CCN Researcher SueYeon Chung Named McKnight Scholar
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience has selected Associate Research Scientist SueYeon Chung of the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute as a 2026 McKnight Scholar. The McKnight Scholar Awards are granted to young scientists who are in the early stages of establishing their own independent laboratories and research careers and have demonstrated a commitment to neuroscience.
“This year’s McKnight Scholars exemplify the extraordinary breadth of questions and approaches that define modern neuroscience, from elucidating the circuit logic of central pattern generators and the neural basis of social cooperation, to uncovering the transcriptional programs that shape vocal communication circuits in songbirds, to developing new computational frameworks for extracting insight from increasingly high-dimensional neural data,” said Vanessa Ruta, chair of the awards committee and Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Professor at the Rockefeller University. “The 2026 McKnight Scholars represent an important diversity of institutions, scientific perspectives and technical approaches, underscoring how critical it is to support outstanding research broadly across the scientific landscape.”
Chung receives the award for her work on neural population geometry: a framework for understanding how activity across large populations of neurons in the brain gives rise to perception and behavior. Using mathematics, computational tools and large-scale neural recordings, her lab explores how neural activity across sensory and cognitive brain regions changes during learning. This provides insights into the geometric principles that govern neural computation and, in turn, behavior.
Chung holds a joint appointment as an assistant professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard University, where she is also an institute investigator at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Center for Brain Science. Before joining the Flatiron Institute, Chung was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. Before that, she was a fellow in computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard.
