Rate My Professor Zirong Gu

Zirong Gu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience within the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas, a position he has held since 2024. He completed his BAGR in Animal Science at Nanjing Agricultural University in 2005, MS in Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan in 2008, PhD in Neuroscience at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati in 2015, and postdoctoral training in Neuroscience at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University in 2023. Earlier in his career, Gu served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center from 2015 to 2016 and as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University from 2017 to 2023. His research centers on the neurobiology of basal ganglia function and dysfunction, examining how GABAergic outputs from the basal ganglia interact with distributed brain regions to mediate flexible, adaptive, goal-directed behaviors. This work addresses impairments in conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and autism.

Gu’s laboratory integrates multidisciplinary approaches across molecular, circuit, and behavioral levels, utilizing techniques including single-cell transcriptomics, sophisticated viral tracing, machine learning-assisted brain-wide circuitry mapping, cell-type and action-specific Cal-light tagging, closed-loop optogenetic manipulation, calcium imaging, Neuropixels recordings, and computational modeling of neural dynamics. He has earned notable awards such as the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (2020-present), the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2019-2022), the SFN Plexon Presenter Award (2023), and several earlier fellowships including Richard A. Akeson Traveling Fellowships and poster presentation awards. Key publications include “Control of species-dependent cortico-motoneuronal connections underlying manual dexterity” (Science, 2017), “Skilled Movements Require Non-apoptotic Bax/Bak Pathway-Mediated Corticospinal Circuit Reorganization” (Neuron, 2017), “Axon Fasciculation, Mediated by Transmembrane Semaphorins, Is Critical for the Establishment of Segmental Specificity of Corticospinal Circuits” (Journal of Neuroscience, 2023), “Semaphorin-Mediated Corticospinal Axon Elimination Depends on the Activity-Induced Bax/Bak-Caspase Pathway” (Journal of Neuroscience, 2020), and “Dopamine-mediated formation of a memory module in the nucleus accumbens for goal-directed navigation” (2024).