Dr. Huizhong W. Tao received her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, where she studied timing-based synaptic plasticity. She completed her postdoctoral training in the University of California at Berkeley in the laboratory of Dr. Muming Poo, where she investigated natural stimuli induced functional plasticity at developing retinotectal synapses. She joined the faculty of University of Southern California as an assistant professor in 2008. Since then, she has studied the function, circuitry mechanisms and experience-dependent plasticity in visual circuits of the mouse brain, using a broad variety of electrophysiological, imaging, neural tracing and optogenetics/chemogenetics tools.