Zhongzheng Fu

Zhongzheng Fu, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center. His research bridges computational modeling and human neurophysiology to investigate the neural basis of cognitive control, decision-making, and error monitoring in the brain.

Dr. Fu's research focuses on understanding how the brain monitors actions and detects errors, particularly through the study of the error-related negativity (ERN), a key electrophysiological biomarker linked to psychiatric conditions. Using intracranial microelectrode recordings, electrocorticography (ECoG), EEG, and eye tracking in human patients, his lab explores neural dynamics in the medial frontal cortex during cognitive tasks.

His work integrates experimental neuroscience with computational modeling to decode brain-behavior relationships and uncover mechanisms that enable generalization of cognitive control across tasks. This research has implications for understanding psychiatric disorders and developing neuromodulation therapies.

Dr. Fu received his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Hong Kong and completed his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology in 2019. He performed postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Ueli Rutishauser at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he investigated neuronal mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility.

He leads the Fu Lab (zfu-lab.org), which aims to elucidate how cognitive control emerges from neural circuit activity across multiple scales—from single neurons to large-scale networks—to support adaptive, goal-directed behavior.