Decision-making, planning, reinforcement learning, social cognition, working memory, neural networks, perception.
Wei Ji Ma is Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU. His lab studies decision-making in planning, social cognition, working memory, perception, and attention, using a combination of human behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and - through collaborations - electrophysiology and neuroimaging. Wei Ji grew up in the Netherlands and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Groningen. He continued as a postdoc in computational neuroscience, first with Christof Koch at Caltech and then with Alexandre Pouget at the University of Rochester. He was Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine from 2008 to 2013. He has been at NYU since 2013. He has affiliate appointments in the Neuroscience Institute, the Institute for the Study of Decision Making, the Center for Data Science, and the Center for Experimental Social Science, and is Collaborating Faculty of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai. With Xiao-Jing Wang, Wei Ji is Program Director of the NIH-funded Training Program in Computational Neuroscience at NYU. Moreover, Wei Ji is active in mentorship, community-building, and outreach. He is a founding member of the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network and of NeuWrite NYU. Wei Ji co-founded and leads the Growing up in Science seminar series, in which scientists tell their "unofficial stories". Read or listen to Wei Ji's own unofficial story. Besides his academic work, Wei Ji is the co-founder of the Rural China Education Foundation.