Faculty Member
Assistant Professor
Department of Neurobiology
Department of Biological Chemistry
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Personal Statement
My long-term research interest is to take an integrated multidisciplinary approach to elucidate the molecular, circuit, and computational mechanisms underlying affiliative social behavior and how their disruptions contribute to social deficits in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. My academic training has provided me with extensive research experience in genetics, bioinformatics, and molecular, cellular, behavioral, and computational neuroscience. During my Ph.D. research at Stanford University, I uncovered novel molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating axonal transport and synapse formation in neurons (Wu et al., Neuron 2013; Klassen*, Wu* et al., Neuron 2010. *Equal contributions). As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, I investigated the neural mechanisms underlying autism using integrative genomic methods as well as in vitro and in vivo model systems. My work provided important insights into the role of microRNA dysregulation in autism (Wu et al., Nature Neuroscience 2016). I also applied single-cell RNA sequencing to characterize cell type diversity in a key social brain area, the amygdala, and developed methods to systematically map brain activity onto molecularly defined cell populations (Wu*, Pan* et al., Neuron. 2017). I further investigated the neural mechanisms underlying sex differences in parenting behavior across molecular, cellular, and neural circuit levels (Chen*, Hu*, Wu* et al., Cell 2019). More recently, by combining novel behavioral paradigms, functional manipulation, in vivo calcium imaging, and computational approaches, I have made important discoveries on the neural circuit mechanisms underlying affiliative, prosocial behavior (Wu*, Dang* et al., Nature 2021; Zhang*, Wu* et al., Nature 2024, Sun et al., Science 2025).
