#TraineeTuesday: Peng Xu

This #TraineeTuesday, we are highlighting Peng Xu, a postgraduate associate in the Cardin Lab! He recently got admitted to Yale INP PhD program with a Gruber Science Fellowship to support his first three years of study.

It takes often a long time to diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease, a neurogenerative disease that leads to impaired memory and cognitive abilities. Peng’s research focuses on finding an innovative method to screen for the earliest onset of the functional disruption of cholinergic and calcium signaling, a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s Disease. According to Peng, it is likely that these results would not only detect disease progression before its hallmark neuronal degeneration but also provide a novel framework for future therapeutic approaches. Last year, he presented a poster at the Society for Neuroscience on this research, entitled “Disrupted neuromodulatory regulation of cortical network dynamics in Alzheimer’s Disease.”

When interviewing with his current mentor, Jessica Cardin, PhD, for his current position, Peng was prepared to demonstrate his extensive knowledge on many complex, lab-specific skills and techniques. To his surprise, Cardin told Peng that she didn’t expect a postgraduate student to come with anything — she encouraged that the postgraduate stage is exactly the time to learn all these research tools and figure out his future. Peng felt respected to have the freedom to explore his potential as a scientist. Additionally, Peng was offered an opportunity to pursue a highly independent project with a 2-year-long longitudinal timeline.

“She considered me equally as any other PhD student in the lab and believed in my ability to handle such an enormous project on my own,” Peng praised. “From mice handling, breeding, and genotyping to surgery, imaging, histology, and data analysis, I took charge of nearly every aspect of my research and developed a comprehensive view of the whole project. This valuable training prepared me well to get onto the next stage of research.”

Peng has long been interested in understanding the human mind. When he was in sixth grade, he detailed in his diary that he would like to find a theory to explain the mind and consciousness. When growing up, he never had access to these concepts, as he attended a public school in China that lacked resources for “non-traditional” subjects such as psychology and neuroscience. However, when he first came into contact with neuroscience during his freshman year of college at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he quickly fell in love with the subject and found it to be a powerful way to investigate the intricate matters of the brain.

The Gruber Science Fellowship is awarded to the highest-ranked applicants to Yale PhD programs in the life sciences, cosmology, and astrophysics. For Peng, receiving the PhD offer from Yale INP, together with the Gruber Fellowship, is not only a recognition of his achievements as a postgraduate student at Yale but also a promise to “shoot for the moon.”

He would like to continue to learn many cutting-edge techniques and test how they interweave together in a brand-new field. His next step is to integrate mathematical and computational models into his research to develop a universal theory that quantitatively describes our fundamental brain states.