Since my childhood, I have been fascinated by two questions:1 why human can do intelligent things that computers cannot do. 2 what is a good life. I am glad that I found out that I can tackle these fundamental questions with the tools provided by modern neuroscience, and this incredible interdisplinary field of brain research provides many exciting opportunities. Since coming to Tsinghua, I have also been increasingly interested in brain related medical problems, like depression and anxiety disorders, which challenge us and makes life difficult for many people. The overarching theme in my lab is what I call connectomics and functional connectomics, where we take inspiration from genomics and functional genomics to aim at arriving at a circuit diagram of the brain and relate circuit structures to their functions and elucidate the computational processes carried out by those circuits

1. Develop computational tools and analyze large volumes of data generated by connectomics and genomics research

2. Find out the neural circuit basis of positive emotions and their relationship to motivations to obtain rewards using imaging and optogenetics

3. Apply such knowledge to mood disorders

4. Apply knowledge gained about neural circuits to artificial neural networks algorithms 

1. Grillo, F.W., Song, S*, Ruivo, LMTG., Huang,L., Gao, G., Knott, GW., Maco, B., Ferretti, V., Thompson, D., Graham,L., De Paola,V*. (2013) Increased axonal bouton dynamics in the ageing mouse cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press

2. Song, S., Liu, L., Edwards, S.V., Wu, S.* (2012) Resolving conflict in eutherian mammal phylogeny using phylogenomics and the multispecies coalescent model. PNAS, 109(37), 14942-14947.

3.Song, S.* (2012). Neural networks near the edge of Chaos. In X. Tang, A. Guo, Neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience.Hangzhou, Zhejiang: Zhejiang Technology Press.

4. Fang-Yen, C., Oh, S., Park, Y., Song, S., Seung, HS., Feld, MS*. (2007) Measurements of voltage-dependent cell movements using heterodyne phase microscopy. Optics Letters 32:1572-1574

5.De Paola, V., Holtmaat, A., Knott, G., Song, S., Wilbrecht, L., Caroni, P., Svoboda, K.* (2006) Cell type-specific structural plasticity of axonal branches and boutons in the adult neocortex. Neuron,49:861-75.

6.Song, S., Sjöström, PJ., Reigl, M., Nelson, S., Chklovskii, DB*. (2005) Highly nonrandom features of synaptic connectivity in local cortical circuits. PLoS Biology 3:e68.

7.Song, S., Abbott, LF*. (2001) Column and map development and cortical remapping through spike-timing dependent plasticity. Neuron 32:339-50.

8.Song, S., Miller, K., Abbott, LF*. (2000) Competitive Hebbian learning through spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity. Nature Neuroscience 3:919-926.

9. Varela, JA., Song, S., Turrigiano, GG., Nelson, SB*. (1999) Differential depression at excitatory and inhibitory synapses in visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 19:4293-4304.