Jiaxin \(Cindy\) Tu

I am a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO. I am originally from Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. After obtaining my Bachelor’s in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, I worked in a non-human primate neurophysiology lab at the University of Minnesota (PI: Benjamin Y. Hayden) as a research technician before coming to St. Louis. (CV)

My Ph.D. thesis is titled “Characterization of The Functional Modular Organization In The Developing Infant Brain Across Topological and Temporal Scales” (PI: Muriah D. Wheelock. Co-PI: Adam E. Eggebrecht).

Specifically, I examined the organization of brain areas with functional connectivity gradients (Gordon et al. 2016 Cerebral Cortex) and compared how well different adult and infant area parcellations fit the functional connectivity data in infants and children. paper/code.

Additionally, I found that while the infant functional network organizations had noticeable differences compared to adults (Kardan et al. 2022 DCN, Tu et al. 2024 bioRxiv), a subset of relatively stable areas displayed adult-like network organization in infant brains. paper/code.

To address the practical difficulty of comparing functional connectivity data formatted with different area parcellation schemes best-fit to an age group, I also examined how well dimensionality methods (including variational autoencoder (VAE), principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA)) on functional connectivity data preserved the functional network structures and interindividual variability to learn a generalizable mapping for converting new datasets to a much more compact, parcel-independent latent space paper/code (link will be updated soon).

During my rotation, I examined the difference in functional connectivity across the progression of Autosomal Dominant Alzheimer Disease (ADAD). I found a hub disruption pattern in ADAD that aligns with targeted attacks, detectable even in pre-clinical stages. paper/code.

Before transitioning to neuroimaging and human brain mapping with functional connectivity, I contributed to several projects studying reward-based decision-making in non-human primates. I analyzed behavioral data and single-unit data collected using tungsten electrodes to study how single neurons encode reward-related variables. I also developed behavioral experiments for humans and non-human primates using MATLAB-based software including MonkeyLogic and PsychToolbox. I have also had some experience running behavioral experiments using humans, mice, rats, and Drosophila, and some familiarity with analyzing ECOG/two-photon Ca2+ imaging and DOT(fNIRS) data during my Ph.D. rotations and in undergraduate research.