Long Ding

University of Pennsylvania
Website : https://www.med.upenn.edu/dinglab/

Title

Basal ganglia contributions to perceptual decision making in monkeys

Biosketch

Long Ding received her BS in Telecommunications from Xidian University in Xi’an, China. Inspired by lectures on classic studies of the pupil reflex and ion channels, where engineering and mathematical concepts led to insightful inferences about how the brain works, she switched fields and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been fascinated by the basal ganglia and looked at their functions through many lenses, including characteristics of resting tremor in Parkinson’s Disease patients, dopaminergic actions that may support vocal learning in songbirds, reward modulated saccade behaviors in monkeys, and neural computations supporting decision making in monkeys. She joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and is now a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience. Her current research focuses on the computational roles of individual basal ganglia nuclei in decision processes that incorporate noisy visual information and reward contexts in monkeys.