PSYC Assistant Professor Awarded $300K for Brain Research as a 2025 Searle Scholar

Weizhen “Zane” Xie, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology (PSYC), is among the 15 recently appointed assistant professors selected from 194 nominees—representing 145 universities and research institutions—to join the 2025 Class of the Searle Scholars Program.

The Searle Scholars Program, funded through the Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust and administered by Kinship Foundation, is designed to support high-risk, high-reward research across a broad range of scientific disciplines by presenting awardees with $300,000 to pursue ground-breaking research in chemistry and the biomedical sciences over the course of three years.

“I’m deeply honored and truly grateful—it means a great deal to me as an early career scientist,” said Xie. “The encouragement and support from this program will help me take important first steps toward new research directions, with the hope of making meaningful contributions to our field.”

Xie will use his Searle Scholar funding to work on a project titled “Reconstructing associative semantic knowledge from neuronal spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe.” The project aims to understand how single neurons in the living human brain represent complex information—such as the semantic knowledge that links concepts and ideas in our mind.

For example, people might intuitively think of a “beach” in connection with “sand,” “sun,” and “umbrella” not because they’re in the same semantic category, but because they often co-occur in people’s experiences of the beach. By studying how these associations are encoded at the level of individual brain cells, Xie’s project could shed light on how our brains organize knowledge and how problems in these processes might contribute to memory disorders.

This new project builds on Xie’s existing body of research on human memory and cognition. Most recently, Xie and colleagues conducted a study involving patients with treatment-resistant epilepsy that showed that when humans have to identify and categorize an image—such as seeing a dog and recognizing it as an animal rather than a human—it’s not just about how many times brain neurons fire, but the order in which individual neurons fire, too.

One of the individuals who nominated Xie to become a Searle Scholar, Dr. Kareem Zaghloul from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, said Xie’s work, “may have the potential to advance our understanding of the neuronal basis of human intelligence, addressing critical gaps in neuroscience that may not be resolved by animal research alone.”

“This couldn’t happen to a more kind and thoughtful colleague,” said Michael Dougherty, PSYC Professor and Chair. “We’re extremely proud to have people like Zane in our department, and especially happy to see Zane’s work being recognized.” 

Published on Thu, Apr 17, 2025 - 10:46AM