Born in 1966, Hu Xintian is Professor and Tutor Supervisor of Doctors and heads the laboratory of sensorimotor integration. After graduating from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1988, he continued his education by enrolling in a graduate program in the Kunming Institute of Zoology. Two and half years later, under the direction of Professor Jingxia Cai, he received his master’s degree in neuroscience and became a junior faculty member at the institute. In 1994, he went to Princeton University in the United States to pursue a PhD. Supervised by Dr. Charles Gross, who discovered the world famous “face cell” and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Xintian Hu studied the spatial information processing function in the prefrontal cortex of the monkey. Some of his data were published in Science magazine. After receiving his PhD degree in 2000, he took a postdoctoral position at the Baylor College of Medicine to study the neuro-control mechanisms of movement under the direction of David Sparks, a renowned neuroscientist in the study of eye movement control. In 2005, he was awarded the One Hundred Persons Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and took his current position at the Kunming Institute of Zoology as a full professor. He currently continues his research on the brain mechanisms of sensory and movement information processing and their integration.

If the brain is viewed as an information processing system, sensory information from different channels is its input, and the different movements that we make daily are its outputs. As a model for studying the outputs, the eye movement control system of the monkey has several advantages: 1) the load is fixed because the weight of the eye ball is more or less constant through time; 2) the eye movements are relatively simple, since its movements can be approximated as three-dimensional rotations around a fixed point in the space and, therefore, can be measured accurately; and 3) the system consists of structures located in both the brain stem and the cortex, which allows us to study both low and high brain functions. All of these characteristics make the eye movement control system an ideal model to study the mechanisms of brain output. In our lab, we use this system to study the information processing mechanisms and plasticity of the brain. Furthermore, due to the fact that many high functions, such as attention and decision making, are involved in eye movement control, we also study mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression in the brain by observing the abnormity of eye movements.