Dale Zhou, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Scholar
Office: 1400 Biological Sciences III
Email: dale.zhou@uci.edu

About Me

Projects

Research Interests

Fun!

Publications

Honors and Awards

I received Bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. I then went on to do my Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied how the brain is a networked system that efficiently processes information for behavior. Now as a postdoc, I am specifically studying decision-making computations dependent on memory, reward, and emotion representations. In research funded by the George E. Hewitt Foundation for Medical Research, I will apply these computational frameworks to better understand anhedonia, a symptom of depression and schizophrenia which describes the inability to experience pleasure or interest in activities that would typically be engaging or rewarding.

Lab Research Projects

I contribute to the following research areas in the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory.

Memory, pattern separation, and decision-making
Anhedonia and reinforcement learning
How the above involve information compression

During my postdoc, I will investigate how the brain network compresses and reconstructs information as network structure changes across the lifespan. I aim to account for computations of memory and reward as network functions of dimensionality reduction and expansion using experimental, naturalistic, and clinical data.

I love reading, movies, and urging my cat to practice gratitude.

Zhou, D. & Bornstein, A.M. (2023). Expanding horizons in reinforcement learning for curious exploration and creative planning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. PsyArXiv : 10.31234/osf.io/bhcwp

Zhou, D., Kang, Y., Cosme, D. Jovanova, M., He, X., Mahadevan, A., Ahn, J., Stanoi, O., Brynildsen, J.K., Cooper, N., Cornblath, E.J., Parkes, L., Mucha, P., Ochsner, K., Lydon-Staley, D., Falk, E., & Bassett, D.S. (2023). Mindful Attention Promotes Control of Brain Network Dynamics for Self-Regulation and Discontinues the Past from the Present. PNAS . DOI: 10.1073/pnas.220107411

Zhou, D., Kim, J.Z., Pines, A., Sydnor, V.J., Roalf, D.R., Detre, J.A., Gur, R.C., Gur, R.E., Satterthwaite, T.D., & Bassett, D.S. Compression supports low- dimensional representations of behavior across neural circuits. NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Information-Theoretic Principles in Cognitive Systems. New Orleans, LA. December 3, 2022.

Zhou, D., Lynn, C.W., Cui, Z., Ciric, R., Baum, G.L., Moore, T.M., Roalf, D.R., Detre, J.A., Gur, R.C., Gur, R.E., Satterthwaite, T.D., & Bassett, D.S. (2021). Efficient Coding in the Economics of Human Brain Connectomics. Network Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1162/netn a 00223

Zhou, D., Lydon-Staley, D.M., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D.S. (2020). The growth and form of knowledge networks by kinesthetic curiosity. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. DOI:10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.09.007

2023-2026 Hewitt Research Fellow & Cunningham Scholar UC Irvine
2021-23 National Research Service Award F31 NIH
2015-17 Intramural Research and Training Award NIH
2015 Departmental Honors in Psychology UMaryland
2015 Departmental Honors in Philosophy UMaryland

What the lab means to me…

“This lab exemplifies a really fun intersection of important science and kind people!“