Penghao Qian from China receives the Brains for Brains Award 2024
With the Brains for Brains Award, the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience honors young scientists who pursue a career in computational neuroscience and whose publication portfolio reveals outstanding merit at a very early stage of their careers. This year’s Brains for Brains Award, endowed with € 2000, goes to Penghao Qian from China. It enables Qian to visit the Bernstein Conference and exclusive laboratories in the field of computational neuroscience in Germany. The award will be presented at the Bernstein Conference on October 2, 2024, in Frankfurt am Main.
Penghao Qian at his Master’s ceremony in summer 2024.
Already interested in computer games and science fiction, Qian decided, after finishing high school in his hometown Nanjing, to study computer sciences at the China Agricultural University in Beijing. As an undergraduate student, Qian combined electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces with virtual reality games. Later on, after joining a summer school on neural engineering and listening to an inspiring talk by Prof. Xiao-Jing Wang on large-scale brain circuits and cognition in the same year, his interest in computational neuroscience was finally awakened.
Diving deeper down to the cellular level, Qian focused during his Master’s project in Prof. Hanchuan Peng’s lab at the Southeast University in Nanjing on structural neural networks. Based on morphology data, he constructed whole brain networks of mice focusing on the distribution of axonal boutons. During this time, Qian developed a toolkit for identifying neural morphology features and cell types.
In September 2024, Qian will start his PhD project at the Fudan University in Shanghai. “[…] In the future, I would like to explore neural mechanisms from a mathematical and theoretical perspective, combined with my knowledge of neural morphology”, he says.
The Brains for Brains Award will be presented on October 2, 2024, at the Bernstein Conference in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Qian will present the project for which he receives the Brains for Brains Award at the ceremonial lecture.
