I started the graduate program in neuroscience at Hopkins in 2019 and spent my first year at Hopkins in Baltimore before joining the Karpova lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in the summer of 2020.
Growing up, I admired scientists, who were portrayed as having curious and questioning minds in books. I’m also curious about the way things work, especially how my own mind works. This led me to focus on the research I’m involved in now: studying the neural basis for symbolic or abstract thinking.
Humans tend to use a lot of symbolic thinking; we unitize everything into symbols and, based on the symbolic structure, incorporate new knowledge or generate actions. An example of this would be playing chess, where you need to first learn the basic rules about the chess pieces and the board. Once you have learned these rules, you can use this to form strategies and win the game. We want to better understand the neural basis of this symbolic thinking.
We can study this symbolic thinking in rats by first building games where they must learn an action sequence (as a symbol), and then advancing to games where they use learned sequences to figure out more complicated rule sets. We study their behavior to figure out how they form symbols and structures and then investigate what is happening at the neural level. This work is in collaboration with Janelia’s Shared Resource teams, who have contributed to the groundwork and infrastructure building over the years. My thesis project couldn’t thrive without support from and collaboration with other teams at Janelia.
One great aspect of living and working at Janelia is the opportunity to easily interact with other researchers, as well as every member of the Janelia community and be exposed to new things both in and out of the lab. For example, I enjoy playing badminton, which is one of the biggest extracurricular interest groups at Janelia. These after-hours activities are another chance to make friends with postdocs, group leaders, engineers, and people from facilities.
Hanqing Wang is doing his PhD at HHMI Janelia Research Campus as part of the Joint Graduate Program with Johns Hopkins University. His current work focuses on the neural underpinnings for abstract task structure and behavioral strategy in rat frontal areas using electrophysiological recordings.