Jizheng Dong

Hello, I am Jizheng Dong, a Computer Science PhD student at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, under the supervision of Professor Erdem Varol.
Prior to joining NYU, I had the privilege of working as a research assistant in the system neuroscience lab of Professor Yi Sun at Westlake University. Before that, I completed my undergraduate studies at Nanjing University, majoring in Applied Mathematics.
My research interests encompass a wide range of topics, including the analysis and modeling of animal behavior, neural activity, connectome, and transcriptome. Currently, I am working on a project that investigates the RNA basis for the neural connections of C. elegans and Drosophila.

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News

01/2025, one preprint on WormID-Benchmark is online!

10/2024, one poster presentation at SfN 2024 Chicago!

09/2024, new color for the website!

09/2023, I join NYU Tandon and the neuroinformatics lab!

07/2023, two poster presentations at The 16th Annual Meeting of Chinese Neuroscience Society.

12/2021, my new website is online!

10/2021, one poster presentation at Neurobiology of Drosophila, CSHL.

Research

Recent Research

Neural Activity Simulation Based on Whole-Brain Connectome

In this project, we simulate the neural activity of Drosophila based on the synapse-level connectome FlyWire.

Genetic Decoding of the Brain Connectome

The key and lock algrithm

In this project, we integrate single cell resolution EM connectomics data with single cell resolution genomics to discover the relationship between gene expression and circuit connectivity.

Past Research

3D Behavior Recording for Free-Behaving Fruit Fly

A fruit fly displays special standing

The project aims for the development of equipment for adaptive recording and analysis of 3D behavior in the free-behaving fruit fly.

How to improve the resolution for behavior recording is an important problem in systems neuroscience. To address this question, we plan to build equipment to track the free-behaving animals. This could be used for behavioral analysis and optical stimulation in brain areas.

Compared to the head-injured or restricted state under which many behavior experiments are performed, fruit fly display lots of behaviors that are not even observed when they are head-fixed, such as special standing and rolling. The existing results have shown that our equipment is valuable.

Steel Defect Detection

The project aims to locale and classify surface defects on a steel product.

Inferring Synaptic Plasticity Rule

It is a theoretical work. Please refer to this document for details.

A Program to Arrange Paper Reference

It can auto arrange the paper reference into a csv, including author, title, year. Please see pdf_ref_spyder for details.

Publications

Preprint:

WormID-Benchmark: Extracting Whole-Brain Neural Dynamics of C. elegans At the Neuron Resolution
Jason Adhinarta, Jizheng Dong, Tianxiao He, Junxiang Huang, Daniel Sprague, Jia Wan, Hyun Jee Lee, Zikai Yu, Hang Lu, Eviatar Yemini, Saul Kato, Erdem Varol, Donglai Wei
bioRxiv 2025 | https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.631621

Poster:

Structured feature detection during social interactions
Jing Ning, Xing-jiang Zhang, Ji-zheng Dong, Zhou Li, Ye-feng Shao, Jun-long Wang, Dan-dan Chen, Qiong Liu, Yi Sun
The 16th Annual Meeting of Chinese Neuroscience Society | poster

Quantification of natural social interactions
Jing Ning, Xing-jiang Zhang, Ji-zheng Dong, Zhou Li, Jun-long Wang, Dan-dan Chen, Qiong Liu, Ye-feng Shao, Yi Sun
The 16th Annual Meeting of Chinese Neuroscience Society | poster

Gesture analysis during social interactions in Drosophila
Jing Ning, Jizheng Dong, Xingjiang Zhang, Zhou Li, Junlong Wang, Dandan Chen, Qiong Liu, Yi Sun
CSHL Neurobiology of Drosophila 2021 | poster