Yuchen Wu

I am a PhD candidate in the ROLI Lab, jointly supervised by Dr. Drew Robson and Dr. Jennifer Li. I joined the lab in summer 2025. My current research focuses on neuroengineering.

I am broadly interested in embodied intelligence. Rather than focusing primarily on dexterous hands or humanoid robots, I am more interested in how biological systems implement intelligence: how internal states represent the external world, how individuals achieve efficient navigation and path integration even in the absence of salient landmarks or in darkness, and how groups coordinate their behavior to give rise to collective intelligence. Whole-brain imaging in freely moving animals brings me closer to addressing these questions. In the shorter term, I hope to develop better tools for investigating important questions in neuroscience. In the longer term, I hope to help reverse-engineer the solutions that nature has developed and translate them into more efficient algorithms.