The KaraZhang Lab, based at the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University and jointly led by Yiyao Zhang and Mursel Karadas, investigates how the brain transforms sensory and cognitive signals into behaviour — and how failures in these processes give rise to neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Our research unites two complementary directions:
Sensory coding & perception
How the brain transforms sensory inputs into stable, behaviourally relevant representations and routes them across a distributed neural hierarchy to support perception, memory, and decision-making. We use the olfactory system as a tractable model circuit to build mechanistic principles that generalise broadly across sensory and cognitive systems — from the discovery of novel temporal computation in the olfactory bulb, to the development of hardware and analytical platforms that make this work possible.
Neuromodulation & network dynamics
How acetylcholine, oxytocin, and other neuromodulators shape the dynamic states of hippocampal networks that underlie learning and memory. The modulation of neural networks is a critical therapeutic target for epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, autism spectrum disorders, and dementia — and understanding neuromodulator-state interactions is a central aim of this programme.
Together we ask how neuromodulatory state gates sensory-cognitive routing across the hippocampal-olfactory axis — a question neither programme could address alone.
Browse our current projects, recent publications, or get in touch if you are interested in joining the lab or collaborating.