Songjun Li

Born in Chengdu, China, I emigrated to the U.S at the age of nine, where I spent the next decade moving across the country from California, Georgia, Maryland, to North Carolina. After entering Emory University to pursue a career in film score composition, I switched gears to dual-major in music and neuroscience. After studying relational memory formation with Dr. Elizabeth Buffalo in undergrad, I joined Dr. Leslie Ungerleider’s lab at the NIH to investigate facial processing – both in the Rhesus macaque monkey model. I then continued my pursuit of understanding how the brain inputs information and outputs behavior at the Boston University School of Medicine MD/PhD program, where I completed my dissertation with Dr. Ziv Williams at Mass General Hospital evaluating single-neuronal responses during complex social decision making in mice. Our work has, thus far, revealed a putative executive mechanism in the prefrontal cortical network that allows animals to evaluate social information about others that can adaptively influence pro-social decisions, competitive effort, and sociability. However, during the final years of my training, I discovered a passion to connect psychiatry with the basic sciences to help transform discoveries into treatments. I am currently most motivated by understanding how the brain processes and encodes socially motivated behaviors, uncovering the mechanisms that go awry in psychosocial disorders using rodent models, and exploring novel treatment options – such as neuromodulation and psychedelics – to restore behavioral function. I am also interested in optimizing digital tools and wearable technologies to detect and track psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. Outside of the clinic and lab, you may find my family and me exploring unbeaten paths, attempting new food and beer recipes, making furniture and cutting boards, and doing much more fishing than catching.