Zirui Huang, PhD
Anesthesiology
Zirui’s expertise and skills are in functional MRI and anesthesiology, with a multidisciplinary background including psychology, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroimaging. His primary research interest lies in investigating the neural substrates of consciousness. By means of pharmacologic, neuropathologic, and psychiatric manipulations of consciousness, he studies various neural signatures in human subjects during awake, anesthesia, vegetative states, and mental/cognitive disorders. To date, he has published 40+ scientific articles. Among those, 20+ first/co-first author articles have been published in Science Advances, Cell Reports, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, The Journal of Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, NeuroImage, etc. He also serves as ad hoc reviewer for prestigious scientific journals, such as Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Molecular Psychiatry, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, The Neuroscientist, The Journal of Neuroscience, etc.
Zirui received a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His graduate work was focused on functional MRI in patients with disorders of consciousness. After completing his doctorate, he took the first postdoctoral training at the University of Ottawa, where he worked with Prof. Georg Northoff and studied self and consciousness. Thereafter, he took the second postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan, where he worked with Prof. Anthony Hudetz and studied the neural mechanisms of anesthetic modulation of human consciousness.
In addition to research, he has served as a guest lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness at the University of Michigan for three years. He also provides hands-on training to students and trainees in the laboratory. He is proud of being a mentor for two research assistants, who have both earned first-authorship and made significant scientific contributions (Campbell et al., 2019, NeuroImage; Tanabe et al., 2020, Anesthesiology).
