Ping-Jung(Lawrence) Lu

I am a Research Assistant at the Neuroinformatics Lab (NYU VIDA), advised by Prof. Erdem Varol. I completed my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University in May 2026. I am also affiliated with the Flinker Lab at NYU Langone Health, where I am advised by Prof. Adeen Flinker and Dr. Amir Khalilian, using intracranial (ECoG) recordings to uncover the latent neural representations that underlie speech across different tasks and stimuli.

My research focuses on multimodal foundation modeling for neural signals, with an emphasis on neural decoding and representation learning across recording modalities, species, and cognitive domains. I am particularly interested in learning shared and transferable neural representations from complex brain data.

Building on this, I am working to connect electrophysiology with molecular and cellular information, recovering signatures of tissue, gene expression, and cell types from neural recordings, toward the longer-term goal of linking cells, genes, and neural activity to inform medicine and therapeutic discovery.

Outside of research, I spend my free time playing piano and guitar, and brewing coffee. I am an avid amateur tennis player and a big dog lover, and I am a huge fan of Novak Djokovic and Bayern Munich FC.