The research program of Dr. Lusha Zhu focuses on Neuroeconomics a.k.a. Decision Neuroscience, a nascent area that is at the interaction between neuroscience and social science disciplines. The board goal of her research is to understand the neurobiological foundation of social decision-making at the mechanistic level. Her work uses neuroscience techniques (e.g. fMRI, lesion, and drug manipulation) and models of economic choice to identify neural substrates of complex social behavior, both in healthy populations and individuals with psychiatric illness. She has applied this approach to examine neurocomputational underpinnings of competition and corporation, as well as how such processes go awry in patients with PTSD, major depression, and brain lesions. 

In future work her lab will investigate the ability of human brain to process social signals within communicative, dynamic social interactions. To address these areas, her lab will bring together strands from cognitive neuroscience, social and clinical psychology, as well as behavioral and experimental economics. Although her main interests have been social decision-making, questions and approaches of her research are applicable to many areas of cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Trained as a neuroeconomist who has been working closely with neuroscientists, psychologists, engineers, and economists, Dr. Zhu looks forward to fruitful collaborations with colleagues in all areas of expertise.

Dr. Zhu received her bachelor’s degree in Physics from Shandong University, master's degree in Economics from Peking University, and Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2010 she joined Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley as an Associate Consultant, and in 2011 Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

For more information, please visit Dr. Lusha Zhu's website:

http://mgv.pku.edu.cn/?co=posts&ac=faculty&catalog=enpiintro&pname=en_Lusha_Zhu