Li Zhaoping, born in Shanghai, China, is a neuroscientist at the

University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-W� ...

in Germany. She is the only woman to win the first place in

CUSPEA CUSPEA (China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application,李政道奖学金) was an examination and admission system used by the physics departments of some American and Canadian universities for graduate school admission from People's Republic of Ch ...

, an annual national physics competition in China, during CUSPEA's 10 year history (1979–1989). She proposed V1 Saliency Hypothesis (V1SH), and is the author of ''Understanding vision: theory, models, and data'' published by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...

Education

Li Zhaoping graduated from

Fudan University Fudan University () is a national public research university in Shanghai, China. Fudan is a member of the C9 League, Project 985, Project 211, and the Double First Class University identified by the Ministry of Education of China. It is ...

in Shanghai in 1984 with a bachelor degree in Physics. During 1984 to 1989, she did her Ph.D. study in Physics in

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. Her Ph.D. supervisor was John J Hopfield.

Career

After a brief stay in

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory specializing in high-energy parti ...

, Zhaoping was a member for

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

in Princeton in 1990–1992, and then was a postdoctoral fellow in

Rockefeller University The Rockefeller University is a Private university, private Medical research, biomedical Research university, research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York (state), New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medica ...

in 1992–1994. In 1998, Li Zhaoping, together with

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on ...

and

Peter Dayan Peter Dayan is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He is co-author of ''Theoretical Neuroscience'', an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian m ...

, co-founded the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

. Currently, Li Zhaoping is a professor at the

. She is also the head of the department of Sensory and Sensorimotor Systems in Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Personal life

She is married to Prof.

, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Research and theory

Li Zhaoping is known as the creator of the

V1 Saliency Hypothesis The V1 Saliency Hypothesis, or V1SH (pronounced‘vish’) is a theory about V1, the primary visual cortex (V1). It proposes that the V1 in primates creates a saliency map of the visual field to guide visual attention or gaze shifts exogenously. ...

, V1SH (pronounced 'vish'), that the primary visual cortex (V1) in primates creates a saliency map of the visual field to guide visual attention or gaze shifts exogenously. Proposed in the late-1990s, V1SH was unpopular initially, since it was contrary to the main and popular idea that the frontal and parietal areas of the brain are responsible for the saliency map. As V1SH gathered more experimental support, Zhaoping became more sought after for keynote or invited speeches in international conferences, and V1SH rises from being unpopular to being controversial. Some report experimental data for the theory, while others report evidence against it. It is argued that if V1SH holds, then the framework to understand how our brain solves the vision problem should be substantially changed. Zhaoping also used a model to propose that feedback from the olfactory cortex to the olfactory bulb serves to segment odors from background for individual odor recognition and carries out other top-down controls, this proposal predicts and explains a diversity of behavioral and neural data.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Li, Zhaoping 1964 births Living people California Institute of Technology alumni Chinese women neuroscientists Fudan University alumni University of Tübingen faculty Academics of University College London Max Planck Institute directors