Zhaoping Li

Zhaoping Li is a Professor at the University of Tuebingen and a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. She holds a PhD in Physics from Caltech (1989) and has held postdoctoral positions at Fermi National Laboratory, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and Rockefeller University.

• B.S. in Physics, Fudan University (1984)
• Ph.D. in Physics, California Institute of Technology (1989)

Her research spans Computational and Experimental Neuroscience, focusing on Pre-attentive Vision, Visual Attention, Sensory (Visual) Coding, Visual and Olfactory Object Recognition, and Nonlinear Neural Dynamics. She is renowned for proposing a theory of the Primary Visual Cortex creating a Saliency Map for visual attention, which has been extensively tested since the late 1990s.

Her 2014 book Understanding Vision: Theory, Models, and Data (Oxford University Press) synthesizes her work, offering a computational framework for biological vision. This book is widely cited and serves as a reference in vision science and computational neuroscience.