Biyu is currently Associate Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience and Physiology, and Radiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She is also an investigator in the Neuroscience Institute. Biyu received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining NYU, she led her own independent research group in the intramural research program of the NIH/NINDS, with an intramural equivalent of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. Her laboratory uses a combination of multimodal human brain imaging, brain stimulation, and computational approaches to investigate the neural mechanisms of perceptual processing in the human brain. She has also made original contributions to understanding the functional roles of spontaneous brain activity and aperiodic brain activity. Among other awards, she has received a Society for Neuroscience Trubatch Career Development Award (2018), an NSF CAREER Award (2018–2023), a Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellowship (2016–2017), a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award (2016–2019), an Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award (2020–2025), and the 2023 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. She has been a Keynote Speaker at the annual meetings of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC, 2016), the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM, 2020), and Gordon Research Conference on “Consciousness, Anesthesia and Evolutionary Biology” (2023). Since 2018, she has been a member at large on the Board of ASSC. Learn more about Dr. He.

Email: Biyu.He@NYULangone.org

Giulia obtained her B.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology and her M.Sc. in Neuroscience from the University of Padua, Italy. In 2016 she spent a period as a research assistant in Dr. Floris de Lange’s lab (Donders Institute, Netherlands) where she focused on predictive processes within the human visual cortex. Following this experience, she joined the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (UNICOG) of Neurospin, France. During her PhD, she worked in the team of Dr. Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz and employed high-density EEG to reveal the representational primitives used by the human infant brain to encode speech, quantity and musical pitch. She arrived in Dr. Biyu He's lab in February 2022. Her current research pertains to the temporal structure underlying perceptual awareness. Adopting a temporal perspective, she aims to uncover the neural mechanisms determining conscious access and perceptual updates.

Email: Giulia.Gennari@NYULangone.org

Mugihiko attained his BSc in chemistry at Hokkaido University and an MSc in agriculture at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He then completed his PhD training in Professor Kazushige Touhara’s lab at the University of Tokyo in 2024, studying the neural basis of the human olfactory perception using noninvasive neuroimaging methods (EEG and fMRI). In June 2024, Mugihiko joined Dr. He’s lab to work on projects examining the neural mechanism of object recognition and how expectation influences perception and conscious awareness.

Lua obtained her B.A. in Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in 2014. She then joined Dr Tony Ro’s lab at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York to pursue her PhD. There she focused on the neural mechanisms of conscious perception, and in particular touch perception. She investigated the neural underpinnings of unconscious touch, and several tactile illusions including sound-touch synesthesia. She is interested in how conscious perception arises through the interaction of sensory information with internal brain states, and how this interaction explains individual differences in perception. To this end, she uses psychophysics, neuroimaging methods (fMRI and EEG) and non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS).

Email: Lua.Koenig@NYULangone.org

Max received a BS in biological sciences from Cornell University in 2017, followed by a stint as lab manager for Dr. He where he studied the whole-brain signature of conscious object recognition. He obtained his PhD from the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in 2024. His doctoral work with Dr. Sylvain Baillet focused on the neural circuits underlying illusory perceptual filling-in using MEG. Max returned to Dr. He’s lab in June 2024 to investigate how naturalistic eye movements shape the content and temporal structure of conscious perception.

Emily completed her B.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Lincoln, UK in 2015. She then obtained her M.Sc. in Brain and Cognition at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, where she conducted a research project in spatial cognition, examining assumptions of embodied cognition. Following this, she joined Prof Clare Press' lab at Birkbeck, University of London to undertake her PhD, examining the influences of prediction on visual and tactile perception and sensory processing in action contexts. Emily joined Dr. Biyu He's lab in June 2021 to work on projects examining the neural correlates of conscious perception across sensory modalities, and how prior knowledge influences perception and conscious awareness. To conduct this research she uses a combination of psychophysics and neuroimaging methods.

Email: Emily.Thomas2@NYULangone.org

Yuan-hao attained his B.Sc. in Psychology at University Graz and M.Sc.in Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin. He completed his Ph.D. training in Felix Blankenburg’s group at Freie Universität Berlin in 2019, studying working memory and decision-making in the somatosensory domain. Yuan-hao joined Dr. He’s lab in March 2020. His current research focuses on two main topics: 1) interplay between prior information and sensory inputs that gives rise to the visual perception; 2) neural mechanisms underlying visual perception, imagination, and hallucination. To tackle these questions, he uses a combination of methods, including neuroimaging (fMRI, M/EEG), psychophysics, and computational modeling.

Email: Yuanhao.Wu@NYULangone.org

Ayaka received her B.S. in neuroscience from UCLA, where she spent a few years in the lab of Dr. Mayank Mehta's lab studying spatial navigation. She then worked in the lab of Dr. Sotiris Masmanidis studying reward-guided learning and movement. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD at NYU in the lab of Dr. Biyu He. She is interested in neural mechanisms of conscious visual perception.

Email: Ayaka.Hachisuka@NYULangone.org

Daniel received his B.S. in Computer Science from Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. He then spent eight years in the tech industry, advancing Deep Learning models for applications in social networks and medical diagnosis. Transitioning to biological networks, he worked with Dr. Samuel Neymotin, where he developed biologically plausible learning mechanisms for Spiking Neuronal Networks. Further, he worked with Dr. Manish Saggar at Stanford to adapt the Mapper algorithm to extract the dynamics of neuroimaging datasets (focusing on fMRI data). Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at NYU in the lab of Dr. Biyu He. Daniel is investigating the dynamics and interactions of brain oscillations (e.g., traveling waves) during conscious and unconscious perception.

Email: Daniel.Hasegan@NYULangone.org

Jonathan received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, and subsequently spent over a decade in the private sector. After rising to the position of COO of a mid-sized consumer goods company, he decided the trick had been won and it was time to pursue his passion: computational neuroscience. He earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2018, including a project in Rafael Yuste’s lab where he developed a computational method to detect temporal ensembles in spike train data. Jonathan is currently pursuing his PhD at NYU, and has recently joined the lab of Dr. Biyu He and plans to investigate how the underlying neural mechanisms differ between conscious and unconscious perception.

Email: jds814@nyu.edu