Social interactions between individuals and among groups are a hallmark of human society as we know it and are critical to the physical and mental health of a wide variety of species including humans. Impairment of social function is a prominent feature of many neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. Nonetheless, many fundamental questions regarding the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior remain unanswered. The central goal of Weizhe Hong’s laboratory is to study general principles of how social behavior is regulated in the brain. The Hong lab takes a multi-disciplinary approach and uses a variety of experimental and computational technologies across molecular, circuit, and behavioral levels. We study how neural dynamics regulate social behavioral decisions within a single brain as well as how emergent inter-brain neural properties arise from social interactions between individuals.

Dr. Weizhe Hong is a Professor of Neurobiology, Biological Chemistry, and Bioengineering at the University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Hong received his PhD degree in 2012 at Stanford University where he studied the molecular mechanism of wiring specificity during neural development. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology studying neural mechanisms of social and emotional behavior. He joined UCLA in 2016 as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2020 and Full Professor in 2023. He is also the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience, an Early Career Award from the Society for Social Neuroscience, a Mallinkrodt Scholar Award, a Vallee Scholar Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a McKnight Scholar Award, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.