Celebrated neurobiologist Chih-Ying Su leaves US for China's university

SMART announced the appointment of Su, whose research focuses on how the brain processes smell using fruit flies and mosquitoes, on July 2.

"I decided to join SMART at the end of last year, deeply impressed by the advanced hardware conditions and the strong academic atmosphere of the research institute," Su said in an email interview with the South China Morning Post. "The outstanding leadership and academic vision of [SMART] president Yan Ning deeply attracted me."

"SMART boasts a world-class research environment and platform facilities," she said, citing that as her reason for choosing SMART as her next academic destination. She said she first visited the institute in 2025 and believes it offers "valuable guidance and growth opportunities."

Taiwan-born neurobiologist Chih-Ying Su. Photo courtesy of SMART

Born and raised in Taiwan, Su earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from National Taiwan University, where she also captained the university's taekwondo team.

She moved to the U.S. in 2000 to pursue a doctorate in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, completing her Ph.D. in 2006 before beginning her academic career in olfactory neuroscience.

Su joined UC San Diego in 2013 as a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences. Two years later, she was named one of the university's 12 Hellman Fellows, a program that provides research funding to promising early-career faculty members as they work toward tenure.

She was promoted to assistant professor of neurobiology in 2020 before becoming a full professor and department vice chair in 2024. During her time at the university, she also received the 2016 Faculty Mentorship Award from its Division of Biological Sciences, according to SMART.

Her research examines how the nervous system detects and processes sensory information, particularly smell, and how those signals shape animal behavior.

She uses fruit flies to study how the brain recognizes odors because they are easy to study and share many important biological features with humans. Although fruit flies have much simpler nervous systems than humans, they can still quickly find food, locate mates and avoid danger through smell. Her work seeks to explain how such a small brain can perform these complex tasks, offering broader insights into how brains process information.

Su has also studied mosquitoes. In 2025, her team published a paper in PNAS showing how Aedes aegypti mosquitoes detect the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans, helping them locate hosts. The species is known for spreading dengue, Zika, yellow fever and chikungunya.

Her research has also been published in leading scientific journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Communications and PNAS.