Our Institute provides an outstanding environment for postdoctoral trainees to advance their skills and receive valuable mentorship from leading experts in neuroscience and neurorehabilitation. We are excited to welcome postdoctoral fellow Sung-Mu Lee, PhD, and to share more about his background and research experiences. Dr. Lee is working in the Memory and Perception Laboratory, directed by Andrew Persichetti, PhD.
Dr. Lee completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Imaging and Radiological Sciences from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taipei, Taiwan. As an undergraduate student, Dr. Lee conducted EEG experiments in the laboratory of Wen-Jui Kuo, PhD. The lab conducts research in the areas of speech, reading, and emotions, as well as epilepsy, and Dr. Lee had the opportunity to apply neuroimaging techniques to address psychological questions.
Next, Dr. Lee enrolled in a PhD program in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience through the Taiwan International Graduate Program at Academia Sinica and National Cheng Kung University. With guidance from his advisors Chun-Yu Lin, PhD, and Chia-Ying Lee, PhD, Dr. Lee developed and conducted his dissertation research studies focused on using fMRI to better understand behavioral priming and perception in humans. As part of his dissertation, he conducted a meta-analysis of fMRI studies to gain insight on the neural correlates of repetition priming. During graduate school, Dr. Lee served as a visiting researcher in the laboratory of Rik Henson, PhD, in the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. There, he worked with colleagues to conduct an fMRI experiment on perceptual processing of faces and completed effective connectivity analyses.
Upon the successful defense of his dissertation, Dr. Lee returned to Cambridge University as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr. Henson. His postdoctoral research involved testing a predictive coding view of the effects of repetition on neural processing using 7T MRI. In 2023, Dr. Lee accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, where he worked with his advisor Anne Sereno, PhD. In his project, Dr. Lee used fMRI to examine how attentional modulations affect neural representations of the shape and locations of objects. This research was supported by the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute to identify age-related attentional deficits.
Dr. Lee began his new role at Jefferson Moss Rehabilitation Institute this month, and he will be working with Dr. Persichetti to measure layer-specific brain activity using high-resolution 7T MRI. Understanding how information from primary sensory cortices and information from higher-order brain areas are organized across cortical layers in regions that are involved in perception, memory, and learning processes is critical for improving our understanding of cognitive function and developing treatments for psychiatric conditions. Dr. Lee will also contribute to imaging projects related to navigation and semantics. His long-term research objective is to understand how the human brain perceives and remembers, and to determine how these processes are affected in neurological and psychiatric disorders.