Dr Pang’s research seeks to uncover the fundamental principles that govern brain structure and function in health, disease, and across species. Specifically addressing the following three complex neuroscience questions: (1) How does brain structure support complex function? (2) How does the brain adapt across development and evolution? and (3) How and why does the brain fail in neurological and psychiatric disorders?
Dr Pang’s research integrates multidisciplinary approaches from physics, psychology, engineering, and neuroscience to develop new theoretical and computational approaches to address the above problems.
Specifically, using structural, diffusion, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, he has shown how human brain geometry and white-matter axonal connectivity constrain large-scale neural dynamics. A paradigm-shifting contribution of his work is demonstrating that brain activity can be described as structured wave-like patterns shaped by the brain’s physical architecture, analogous to how physical boundaries shape ripples in a pond. This establishes the first-ever unified physics-informed framework for linking structure to function across individuals, species, and disease conditions.
Moreover, by integrating cross-species data with computational modelling, his work identifies conserved and divergent principles of brain organisation, advancing mechanistic understanding of brain function. This approach enables more biologically grounded models of brain disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, with potential applications in improving diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic strategies.