Wei-li Chang, MD, PhD, grew up in Houston, Texas, in the same neighborhood as NASA’s Mission Control. She attended Stanford University, where she earned a degree in human biology, with a concentration in neurobiology and psychobiology, and was also a member of the NCAA Division I women’s crew team. Upon graduation, she was awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Post-Baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award, and conducted human neuroimaging research on schizophrenia and related disorders within the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Section on Inegrative Neuroimaging, under the mentorship of Dr. Karen Berman. After two years at the NIH, she matriculated into the MD/PhD program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). There, she completed her doctoral dissertation in neuroscience, working with Dr. Neal Swerdlow to study how the dopamine D3 receptor system regulates sensorimotor gating in rodents, a preclinical model relevant to schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. During her training as a Leon Levy Fellow within the Columbia Psychiatry Residency Program, she continued to study neural circuitry of emotion-related behaviors in rodents, first under the mentorship of Dr. Joshua Gordon, and then with Dr. Rene Hen after Dr. Gordon departed Columbia to lead the NIMH. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Hen’s lab, using in vivo calcium imaging and optogenetics in freely moving mice to study the function of interneuron subtypes in the ventral hippocampus during behavioral models for anxiety and anhedonia. outside of her research time, she delivers psychiatric care in New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Emergency Department and Mobile Crisis Team as well as within the New York City jail system. She plans to eventually become a principal investigator of basic/translational neuroscience lab within an academic medical center.
