SueYeon Chung Named a 2025 Rising Star of Neuroscience by The Transmitter
One of 25 awardees worldwide to be recognized for outstanding contributions in neuroscience
Kempner Institute Investigator SueYeon Chung (center) has been named a Rising Star of Neuroscience 2025 in recognition of her scientific accomplishments, mentoring, and community building efforts.
Credit: Anna Olivella
Kempner Institute Investigator SueYeon Chung has been recognized by The Transmitter as a Rising Star of Neuroscience 2025. The award recognizes early-career researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the field of neuroscience.
Awardees were selected based their scientific accomplishments and their mentoring and community-building efforts.
“I’m deeply honored by this recognition,” said Chung. “It’s especially meaningful because our work is interdisciplinary—bridging neuroscience, physics, and machine learning.”
Chung’s research focuses on developing quantitative frameworks for interpreting large-scale neural data. Her group’s Manifold Capacity Theory redefines how neural networks’ computational capacity is understood, shifting from individual data points to “point clouds.”
“SueYeon stands apart by bringing analytically rigorous ideas that nevertheless stay close to real brains,” said Venkatesh N. Murthy, Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor and Kempner Associate Faculty Member. “Her work on the Manifold Capacity Theory reframes neural efficiency in terms of selectively discarding irrelevant variation while preserving features essential for behavior.
Chung joined Harvard in July 2025 as a Kempner Institute Investigator, faculty member in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Brain Science (CBS), and Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. She also holds a joint appointment in Applied Mathematics within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
The Transmitter, a neuroscience news website funded by the Simons Foundation, created the Rising Stars in Neuroscience award in 2025 to recognize the accomplishments of early-career neuroscientists. The award was open to postdoctoral researchers and early-career principal investigators who opened their labs within the past five years, and awardees were announced on November 15 as part of The Transmitter’s year end State of Neuroscience report.
