Weizhen Xie Receives 2025 Young Investigators Award

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) has named Department of Psychology (PSYC) Assistant Professor Weizhen Xie one of its 2025 Young Investigator grantees—early-career scientists who are pursuing innovative studies in brain and behavior disorders.

Of the 895 applicants reviewed by the BBRF’s Scientific Council—a volunteer body of 194 leading experts across psychiatry and neuroscience—165 were selected to receive the 2025 honor, and Xie was one of them.

“Zane is exceptionally deserving of the award,” said PSYC Professor Alexander Shackman. “He is incredibly talented, curious, and thoughtful in his approach to understanding how emotion and cognition are orchestrated by the human brain.”  

With the support of a two-year, $70,000 grant from the BBRF, Xie will work with Shackman on a project that uses scalp electrodes to non-invasively target deep parts of the brain associated with fear and anxiety, primarily the amygdala, using an emerging technique called temporal interference (TI) electrical stimulation. By having study participants perform the Maryland Threat Countdown task in Xie’s ICON Lab—while undergoing both real and fake TI stimulation—the researchers hope to understand how non-invasive brain stimulation changes participants' self-reported feelings of anxiety and physical manifestations of anxiety like dilated pupils.

“Instead of relying on fMRI, we will track rapid, real-time changes in pupil size using eye-tracking. This provides two key advantages; one, pupil responses offer a fast, continuous readout of stimulation-induced changes in threat anticipation, and two, they are more objective than self-reported ratings,” said Xie.

Xie says that this work is important because it aims to tackle a challenging question: How can we safely and effectively influence deep brain structures without surgery?

“These deep brain structures are central to many aspects of mental health, yet existing tools either cannot reach them or are invasive,” Xie continued. “Our study tests an emerging non-invasive deep brain stimulation method and provides an initial test of its real-time effects, taking an early step toward methods that could one day help address anxiety, a condition that affects nearly one-third of the U.S. population.” 

 

 

Published on Wed, 10/08/2025 - 11:46