Official Story
Weiji received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He went on to do postdocs in computational neuroscience with Christof Koch at Caltech and with Alex Pouget at the University of Rochester. He became Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 2008 and moved to New York University in 2013, where he is now Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology. His research focuses on perceptual and cognitive decision-making under uncertainty, with a recent focus on complex planning.
Unofficial Story
Weiji was born in a very small town in the far northeast of The Netherlands, and grew up in the progressive but still remote town of Groningen. He is a third-generation Dutch whose single mom vacillated between Chinese tiger parenting and Dutch irreverence. Weiji had a bizarre childhood, graduating from high school at age 14 and from college at 17, along the way picking up media appearances, deficits in social skills, and an inflated self-image. His confidence came crashing down in his PhD, which was initially misguided (bad advisor) and eventually just too hard (string theory). He was leaning heavily on a fellow grad student and his PhD never felt like his own. Weiji was also easily distracted, spending more time being active in organizations and playing online chess than doing research. Making it to faculty seemed like a distant dream. He considered alternative careers, including business consulting, but decided to give science one more chance. Starting as a postdoc offered new opportunities for delusions of grandeur: he thought he would solve consciousness using statistical physics. Back on Earth, Weiji published only one book chapter with Christof Koch, and in 2004, Christof had no choice but to kick him out of his lab. Only in his second postdoc, under Alex Pouget's whip, did he start to get his act together, but this was also a time when, working besides a highly skilled fellow postdoc, impostor complex hit hard. Weiji got his faculty job thanks to just enough people seeing promise in the absence of accomplishments. His procrastination is still alive and kicking to this day, but since his students and postdocs now do the actual work, he can get away with it.