I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Grammar and Cognition Lab (GraC) of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). My research broadly focuses the function and mechanisms of language, and its loss in clinical conditions. My recent work developed computational metrics to capture speech and language changes in psychosis and dementia, and linked these metrics to functional brain hierarchy using fMRI.

I work on trying to understand the mechanism of language and its deterioration in psychosis and dementia. I view language as a readout of cognition and its dynamics, with changes in mental states reflected in language patterns. This line of thought motivated me to join the DELTA-LANG project to explore this theoretical perspective in schizophrenia.

Another area of interest is developing computational learning models based on speech and language metrics for disease classification and severity prediction. In addition to theoretical explorations of how language functions, I also aim to contribute to real-world clinical practice by providing computational tools for early diagnosis and improved prognosis. For this, I am part of the TRUSTING project on psychosis relapse prediction and an international collaborative grant from Guangdong Province on Alzheimer’s prediction.

I am Chinese, born in Ezhou, Hubei, the ancient capital of Eastern Wu. I moved to Zhuhai for my BA in translation at School of Translation Studies, Jinan University. That was also the period when I interned at Zhuhai People’s Hospital and participated in several public health studies. After that, I pursued a master’s in theoretical and applied linguistics with a specialization in computational linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). Later, I joined the GraC lab and completed my doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Wolfram Hinzen and Dr. Núria Bel.

Key words

Natural language processing; computational psychiatry; speech; language; fMRI; machine learning; deep learning; dementia; schizophrenia