Siqi Liu

Hi! I am a U2 neuroscience undergraduate student at McGill University. I've been volunteering at the Poulin Lab since 2025 summer, we are researching on dopaminergic neural circuits and how they are impaired in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. The two projects I am involved in are about CALB1 Dopaminergic neurons' roles in locomotion and reconstructing neuronal morphology in 3D. What's more, I have received training and developed strong proficiency in wet lab techniques such as genotyping, molecular cloning, confocal imaging, and behavioural analysis.

Beside studying and researching, I enjoy playing badminton and tennis, drawing (digitally and physically) as well as travelling.

education

skills

Wet Lab

Intersectional Genetics | Molecular Cloning & Plasmid Design | Confocal Imaging | Behavioural Assay | Genotyping | Mouse Handling & Injection | Immunohistochemistry (IHC) | Cell Culture | FACS

Technical Skills

Programming Languages: Python (MatPlotLib, NumPy, PyTorch)
Software & Tools: GitHub | Prism Graphpad | Snapgene | Microsoft Office

certificates

projects

🧠

Calbindin Stratifies Midbrain Dopaminergic Neurons Governing Distinct Aspects of Locomotion
Under review in Neuron and PNAS | Conference Abstract (P2-67) | Conference Poster (17.3)

Brain-wide mapping of dopaminergic neuron morphology at single-cell resolution via sparse labeling
Poster

Topics: Intersectional Genetics

Validated SINGLET (Single-cell INtersectional Genetic Labelling Enhanced by tTA), a novel viral labeling strategy to map distinct dopaminergic (DA) neuron subtypes at single-cell resolution. The project involved sparse labeling in transgenic mice, whole-brain tissue clearing (EZclear), and light-sheet microscopy. An AI model was trained to automatically identify and trace fluorescently labeled neurons, successfully mapping their projections from the midbrain to the striatum.

Music Generation with RNN
Code

Topics: Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) | Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)

This project trains a PyTorch LSTM model for music generation. The model learns from Irish folk songs written in ABC notation by treating music as a character sequence and training on a next-character prediction task. After training with cross-entropy loss and the Adam optimizer, the model samples new ABC notation one character at a time, extracts valid generated song snippets, and converts them into .wav audio files. I adjusted the training parameters for my run, including 1000 training iterations, batch size 64, sequence length 300, learning rate 0.001, embedding dimension 256, and hidden size 1024.

experience

Research Intern at Poulin Lab
Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital | May 2025 – Present

Topics: Dopamine neural circuit, neurodegenerative disorder, neurodevelopmental disorder

Researched on the roles of CALB1 expression in specialized dopaminergic subsystems governing distinct aspects of locomotion; Training AI to recognize sparsely labeled neurons in lightsheet images.

Volunteer
Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre | 2025

Facilitated resident transport and participation in synagogue assemblies, providing compassionate support to elderly residents.

Mushroom Care Coordinator
MycoNurseries | 2024 – 2026

We grow blue oyster mushroom sustainably, in part from used coffee grounds. I also assist research coordinator and research lead in identifying new strategies to encourage mushroom growth, and conduct mushroom care shift weekly.

interests

Tennis

I'm an amateur tennis player. I enjoy the sweating after a long playing session, and it helps me to destress too! (Photo: my striking moment)

Painting

I do both physical & digital painting (digital more often now..). Opening a brand new canva just make me enter my own creative realm. Above is an oil painting I did a while ago, a copy of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, isn't it nice and calm~

Travelling

I quite enjoy exploring new places, cultures, and most importantly..food! It's always fun to see what's going on outside of the hometown, just like me now, studying aboard :)