Jie Zheng Receives Outstanding Early Career Faculty Research Award

The UC Office of the President has selected Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Jie Zheng to receive an Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Award.  

In their first year, the UCOP Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Awards seek to advance the university’s commitment to the scholarship and creative activity of early career faculty across all 10 UC campuses. There are 60 total awardees, with recipients receiving a $50,000 prize to support their research 

Zheng plans to use the award to focus on learning more about the way the midbrain, or the topmost part of the brainstem, contributes to our ability to form and retrieve memories. 

She writes that her focus will be on the specific part of the midbrain called the substantia nigra, which plays a large role in the release of dopamine. Her project will use deep brain stimulation surgery to implant special probes that can record hundreds of neurons at once, then conducting memory tasks involving video clips. 

“We focus on event boundaries — transitions between sequential events, such as finishing one chapter of a book and starting another — where the brain naturally reorganizes and stabilizes memory,” Zheng wrote in her application. 

The project will also explore how electrical stimulation of the midbrain region changes memory outcomes. 

The project “will generate critical insights into midbrain contributions to memory — a domain where human studies remain scarce — while establishing a technical platform for research previously considered infeasible,” she wrote.

Her project is titled “Cellular Precision Neural Interfaces for Midbrain Modulation and Memory Enhancement.” 

Zheng joined UC Davis in 2024 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School.