Updates, events, and highlights from the Zhang Lab.
Dr. Guang-Wei Zhang was invited to speak in the Neuroscience Institute Seminar Series at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), presenting “Understanding Animal Naturalistic Behaviors From Videos” in Link Auditorium.
Congratulations to Henry Oo, who has received a travel award from the VCU School of Medicine, supported by the Graduate Education Student Travel Fund. The award will support his travel to Neuroscience 2026, the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., to share his work. Well done, Henry!
We are excited to welcome Asher Stang, a rotation graduate student from VCU's Biomedical Sciences Doctoral Portal (BSDP), who joins the lab from September 8 through November 13, 2026. Welcome, Asher!
VCU News featured Aarushi Rao and her summer in the lab, where she led development of NeuroFlow, a tool that helps researchers analyze imaging data from their experiments more efficiently. Aarushi is a sophomore Honors College student and biology major who joined us through the Honors Summer Undergraduate Research Program. Congratulations, Aarushi!
VCU Convergence has awarded the lab a Team Planning Grant for Decoding the Neural Architecture of Social Volition, which combines large-scale electrophysiology, single-cell calcium imaging, and computational attractor modeling to enable therapeutic targeting of social apathy: the loss of motivation to initiate social engagement, among the least treatable symptoms in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and autism. The team will build AI models that track activity across hundreds of neurons over time, to identify which neural systems drive the decision to engage socially.
Dr. Guang-Wei Zhang (School of Medicine) leads the project with Dr. Priyodarshan Goswamee (School of Medicine) and Dr. Dean Krusienski (College of Engineering). The program awarded $10,000 to each of 15 projects involving nearly 70 faculty, and is reserved for teams of three or more faculty drawn from at least two different schools or colleges.
Read the VCU Convergence announcement
The Zhang Lab has been awarded an NIH NIA R24 Pilot & Feasibility Grant from the Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging Research Network to study naturalistic group social behavior in aging and social loss. This award will enable us to explore how social dynamics change across the lifespan and in response to social loss, using rodent models. We are grateful for this support to advance our understanding of the social dimensions of aging.
See the Research Network's award recipients
Dr. Guang-Wei Zhang has been awarded a Whitehall Foundation Research Grant to study the circuit architecture underlying the control of naturalistic parenting behaviors using rodent models. The Whitehall Foundation supports basic research in vertebrate and invertebrate neurobiology, with a focus on neural mechanisms that underlie behavior. We are grateful for the generous support from the Whitehall Foundation to the Zhang Lab.
Congratulations to Henry Oo, whose abstract has been accepted for presentation at Neuroscience 2026, the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. The meeting runs November 14–18, 2026 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. We're excited to see him share his work with the neuroscience community!
Dr. Can Tao (Catherine) has been awarded a Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator Grant, running from January 2027 through January 2029, to study estrogen-related female neuropsychiatric disorders. The BBRF Young Investigator program supports outstanding early-career scientists in neuroscience and psychiatry. Congratulations, Catherine, on this prestigious award!
We are excited to welcome Zhelia Arif, who joins the lab in August 2026 as a Neuroscience master's student in VCU's MS program. Welcome, Zhelia!
Dr. Guang-Wei Zhang was named a 2026 Butler-Williams Scholar by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and attended the program at the NIH campus on August 3–6, 2026. The program is named in honor of Robert N. Butler, MD, the founding director of the NIA, and T. Franklin Williams, MD, its second director. Now in its fourth decade, it brings early-career investigators new to aging research together with NIA leadership and program staff for an intensive week on the science, gaps, and opportunities in the field. Congratulations!
Aarushi Rao presented her poster at the Summer Student Research Symposium, held Friday, July 24, 2–4 PM in the Larrick Center. Her poster, NeuroFlow: An Integrated, Cross-Platform Workflow for Mouse Brain Atlas Registration and Quantification, showcased the browser-based pipeline she developed in the lab. This is fantastic work. Congratulations, Aarushi!
The Zhang Lab was among the 500 participants selected worldwide for Built with Claude: Life Sciences, a global virtual hackathon hosted by Anthropic & Cerebral Valley in partnership with the Gladstone Institutes.
We are thrilled to welcome three talented high school students joining the lab remotely (off-campus, virtual): Arjun Kode (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology), Jihyo Lee (Deep Run High School, Richmond), and Neha Yashawini Karthikeyan (Maggie L. Walker Governor's School, Richmond). Welcome to the team!
We are happy to welcome Ava Gardner, a post-baccalaureate pre-med student at VCU, to the lab for the summer. Welcome, Ava!
We are happy to welcome Wakas Mustafa, a VCU undergraduate student, to the lab for the summer. Welcome, Wakas!
We are excited to welcome Aarushi Rao, a VCU undergraduate student, to the lab through the Wright Center Summer Undergraduate Research Program (WSURP). Aarushi will join us from May 27 through July 24, 2026. Welcome, Aarushi!
We are excited to welcome Lindsey Wilson from VCU's MSTP (MD-PhD) Program for a rotation in the lab starting June 2026. Welcome, Lindsey!
We are thrilled to welcome Henry Oo as the lab's first graduate student, starting May 2026. Henry joins us from VCU's Neuroscience PhD Program. Welcome to the team, Henry!
Dr. Can Tao has been awarded the 2026 Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute Science Writers Fellowship. Congratulations, Can!