About me

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School (I go by Lily). My research develops computational approaches to study brain–behavior relationships under real-world heterogeneity, with a focus on aging, neuropsychiatric symptoms, and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). I use multimodal neuroimaging, biomarkers, electronic health records (EHR), text-derived phenotypes, and multi-cohort datasets as complementary sources of evidence to identify brain–behavior patterns that are robust across contexts, context-specific, or individualized.

At McLean, I work with Prof. Lisa D. Nickerson in the Applied Neuroimaging Statistics Research (ANSR) Lab at the McLean Imaging Center and Prof. David Harper in the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry. My current work extends and applies multimodal data-fusion approaches—including SuperBigFLICA—to integrate PET, structural MRI, fluid biomarkers, EHR, and clinical measures in studies of aging, dementia, and neuropsychiatric symptoms. I am developing this broader direction as a form of computational neuroecology: using computational models and multi-source data to study brain–behavior relationships in the heterogeneous settings where cognition, symptoms, and clinical outcomes emerge. Before joining McLean, I was a Postdoctoral 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 and NLP approaches for characterizing 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.