Seminario de Investigación: Thalamic control of prefrontal flexibility in a changing world

Ponente: Mengxing Liu. Biomedical Research Institute, Virginia Tech & Dept. of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, USA

Biosketch: Dr. Liu first pursued a master's degree in psychology at Shaanxi University (China), where he gained foundational skills in experimental methodologies of cognitive neuroscience. His research utilized fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms of language processing in naturalistic settings. Following this, he moved to the Basque Center for Brain, Cognition & Language (San Sebastian, Spain) training in cognitive neuroscience, where he developed a keen interest in the structure and function of the human thalamus. His work involved using diffusion MRI to quantify the white-matter connections between the thalamus and cortical structures. Additionally, he employed fMRI techniques to explore thalamic involvement in various language systems. He obtained a PhD in Neuroscience form the Basque Country University in 2023.

Since 2023 Dr. Liu has been a postdoctoral researcher based across Virginia Tech and the University of Iowa (USA), studying how the human brain builds, maintains, and updates internal models of changing environments. His work combines task-based fMRI, representational similarity analysis, and recurrent neural network modeling to ask how thalamic and prefrontal circuits support cognitive flexibility. In this talk, he will present some evidence about how the human thalamus builds a compact summary of the external world, and uses it to reconfigure the prefrontal cortex.

Fecha y hora: viernes, 25 de septiembre de 2026, 13:00 h,

Lugar: Seminario de Anatomía