About me

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School (I go by Lily). I develop computational and multi-modal neuroimaging methods to understand mechanisms of brain disorders—with a primary focus on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), and broader applications to psychiatric conditions and aging. At McLean, I work with Prof. Lisa Nickerson in the Applied Neuroimaging Statistics Research (ANSR) Lab at the McLean Imaging Center and Prof. David Harper in the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry, developing data fusion frameworks that integrate neuroimaging, fluid biomarkers (e.g., cerebrospinal fluid, blood plasma), electronic health records, and other modalities to characterize disease subtypes and stages and identify targets for intervention. Before joining McLean, I was a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School, where I worked with Prof. Sudeshna Das in the MIND Data Science Lab on deep learning approaches—including natural language processing and neuroimaging analysis—for understanding dementia from heterogeneous clinical data.

I received my Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences (Cognitive Neuroscience) from the University of California, Irvine, where I worked with Prof. Elizabeth R. Chrastil in the Spatial Neuroscience Lab and collaborated with Prof. Jeffrey Krichmar on brain-inspired computing. That work investigated the neural mechanisms of human spatial navigation—how the brain computes travel direction, trajectory planning, and spatial decision-making—using psychophysics, fMRI, and computational modeling. Spatial navigation is among the earliest cognitive domains affected in Alzheimer’s disease, making the behavioral and neural measures from this work potentially relevant to early detection and intervention.

Underlying this trajectory is training across experimental psychology, neuroscience, and geography. I hold a B.S. in Psychology from South China Normal University and an M.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC Irvine; I also hold an M.A. in Geography from UC Santa Barbara, where I studied how people interact with and are shaped by their environments. That interdisciplinary lens shapes how I approach neuroscience: cognition is situated in context, varies across spatial and demographic scales, and understanding these dimensions is essential for developing equitable approaches to brain health.