Li Zhaoping

Timeline

1. 1984–1989

   Studying physics

   She earns a B.S. in physics at Fudan University in 1984 and a physics PhD at California Institute of Technology in 1989.

2. 1998

   Co-founding the Gatsby Unit

   Before her move to UCL in 1998, she works at Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Rockefeller University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She then co-founds the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL.

3. Early 2000s

   The V1 saliency hypothesis

   In the early 2000s, she proposes that the primary visual cortex in primates creates a saliency map that draws attention to salient locations.

4. 2014

   A book on visual computation

   In 2014, she publishes Understanding Vision: Theory, Models, and Data with Oxford University Press.

5. 2015

   A quantitative test of saliency

   With Li Zhe, she derives a parameter-free prediction from the V1 saliency hypothesis and confirms it using human behavioral data.

6. 2018

   A professorship at Tübingen

   In 2018, she takes a professorship at the University of Tübingen and becomes a Max Planck Fellow, conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

7. 2026

   Professor at Tübingen and MPI

   She is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tübingen and heads the Sensory and Sensorimotor Systems department at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics; her research interests include pre-attentive vision, neural networks, and machine vision. In April 2026, she posts an arXiv preprint that frames vision as looking and seeing through an attentional bottleneck. In June and July 2026, she leads the Braitenberg 100 symposium on computational neuroscience.