About Me

Hi, I’m Minxing Liu 👋

Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m a PhD student in Computational Neuroscience, driven by a deep curiosity about how the brain computes, learns, and perceives the world around us. When I’m not staring at neural data or writing code, you’ll likely find me on the tennis court.

Research

My research sits at the intersection of neuroscience, mathematics, and machine learning. I’m fascinated by:

  • Neural coding: How do neurons represent information? What’s the geometry of neural population activity?
  • Sensory processing: How does the brain transform raw sensory input into rich perceptual experiences?
  • Computational modeling: Building biologically plausible models that capture the computational principles of neural circuits.
  • Data analysis: Developing statistical and machine learning methods to decode neural recordings from multi-electrode arrays, calcium imaging, and fMRI.

I believe that bridging theory and experiment is the key to understanding the brain — and that the most exciting discoveries lie exactly at that boundary.

Background

I hold a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and neuroscience, which gave me the quantitative toolkit and biological intuition I needed to ask big questions about the mind. My PhD journey has taken me through:

  • Single-neuron electrophysiology and population coding
  • Dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA, UMAP, manifold learning)
  • Recurrent neural network models of working memory and decision-making
  • Statistical inference for large-scale neural data

Life Outside the Lab

Science keeps my mind sharp, but tennis keeps me sane. I’ve been playing since middle school and I love every aspect of the game — the strategy, the athleticism, the mental battle against yourself and your opponent.

A few tennis facts about me:

  • Favorite surface: Hard court (though I have a secret soft spot for clay)
  • Playing style: Baseline grinder who loves constructing points
  • Tennis heroes: Rafael Nadal (for sheer determination) and Roger Federer (for effortless grace)
  • Current goal: Break into the 4.0 NTRP level

I also enjoy hiking, cooking, and reading science fiction — anything that stretches imagination beyond what’s immediately possible.

This Blog

This site is my space to share:

📝 Research notes — Concepts I’m working through, paper summaries, and ideas from the field of computational neuroscience.

🎾 Tennis diaries — Match reflections, technique breakdowns, and the mental game of competitive tennis.

🚀 PhD life — Honest reflections on the graduate school journey: the breakthroughs, the setbacks, and the lessons learned along the way.

Feel free to reach out if any of this resonates with you!

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