On Jul. 1, 2026, Professor Chih-Ying Su, previously Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at the University of California San Diego, announced she has joined the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation (SMART) as a Senior Investigator.

Professor Su received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University and completed postdoctoral training at Yale University. Her research has long focused on understanding how the nervous system senses and processes external information and how these processes shape animal behavior.

Her work centers on olfactory information processing and neuromodulatory mechanisms, with particular emphasis on the dynamic regulation of sensory systems during early stages of information processing. Her research has been published in leading journals in neuroscience and biology, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Communications, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Su lab uses the fruit fly (Drosophila) as a model system to study a central question in neuroscience: how does the nervous system efficiently extract and utilize sensory information in complex and constantly changing environments to generate appropriate behavioral responses? Their research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying early-stage olfactory information processing and how neuromodulators dynamically alter sensory neuron physiology to influence downstream neural circuits and behavior.

The Su lab combines genetics, electrophysiology, calcium imaging, behavioral analysis, and electron microscopy to investigate neural mechanisms across molecular, cellular, and circuit levels.