Hi, Dinghao here :)

I’m finishing my PhD in neuroscience at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, studying how a tiny brainstem nucleus uses dopamine to rapidly tune memory accuracy in the hippocampus. I’m graduating in December 2026 and looking for data science roles in Europe.

Recently I’ve been reading Mason & Dixon (1997), learning SQL and intermediate machine learning, and working on a computational analysis of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

Reach out to me: [dinghao.luo@outlook.com]
Find me: GitHub · Reddit · Instagram · LinkedIn · CV

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writing :)

Writing, along with reading, was one of my first true passions. Like many kids, I kept a journal as I grew up, and the advent of the Internet age allowed me to transform things I wrote in my journal into an online repository. I wrote under the pen-name amoxitoxin in both Chinese and English since I was 15, and have translated selected pieces into English, which can be found on the writing page. Here are some of the pieces of which I am proudest:

book review On Gravity's Rainbow sci-comm Place Cells and the Brain's Cartography journal Two Freedoms book review On Solenoid journal Shanwei

Since my undergraduate years at Cambridge, however, and now through my PhD, I have written mostly about science. I was one of the earliest members of Neu-Reality (神经现实), a Chinese-language neuroscience science communication platform, and spent three years as science editor and translator there. After that were seven months at Scientific American China, where I wrote weekly news on their digital platform, edited translations of each month’s SciAm magazine, and finished a print feature on Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Accelerating Research on Consciousness (ARC) initiative, interviewing researchers like Cyriel Pennartz and Anil Seth.

My translation of Entangled Life (2020) won the 2025 Pingshan Natural History Museum Book Award.

My longest writing project was translating Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020) into Chinese (《菌络万象》), taking almost 3 years as I was juggling my PhD experiments and analyses on the side. The Chinese edition is widely loved (8.7/10 on Douban) and won the 2025 Pingshan Natural History Museum Book Award amongst others. I sat down with Sheldrake afterwards for a conversation about fungi, translation, and strangeness.

→ writing

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thoughts :)

My mom says I used to devour all the books that I could get my hands on as a kid, and reading was probably my favourite pastime from childhood through to my college years. The early years of my PhD interrupted the habit for a while, and it was Paul Auster’s Moon Palace (1989) that pulled me back in. Since then I have been making up for lost time. The writers I return to most, for now, are Mircea Cărtărescu and Thomas Pynchon. If you are looking for inspiration and haven’t read any of these, I promise you won’t regret your time:

• Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015) if you want to break the boundary between the real and the surreal
• Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) if you wish One Battle After Another (2025) were weirder and sadder
• Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher was a 3-hour read that sharpened my politics
• Grace Lindsay’s Models of the Mind (2021) is an extraordinary neuroscience book on how the mind and the machine meet
• When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) by Benjamín Labatut was part physics history, part fever dream, and shook my physics-uninitiated heart
• … and if you read Chinese, my translation of Entangled Life (2020) by Merlin Sheldrake, which opened my eyes to the secret life of fungi

→ books

I came to film late and mostly through Lindsay, who knew her directors the way I knew my prog-rock bands: deeply, historically, and with opinions. She taught me to watch differently, and now I find myself noticing framing and cuts as I notice plot. I write about films and TV shows when their scenes keep coming back afterwards, and here are some of them:

• Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010) takes on the almost impossible task of seeing the world clearly and still finding beauty in it
• Aftersun (2022) by Charlotte Wells made me tear up with a remix of Queen and Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’ (1981)
• Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) if you want Yugoslav history as a three-hour brass-band epic that ends Solaris (1972)-style

→ films · → tv

I’ve played games casually since I was a kid, until Dark Souls (2011) made me take them seriously. It taught me that games could demand the same depth of attention to their worlds and characters that novels do, and I got hooked on that: the challenge, the exploration, and the stories that long outlast the play sessions. These are some of the games that drew me in most:

• Outer Wilds (2019) (Mobius Digital) is a love letter to the beautiful ephemerality of organic civilisations
• Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 (2023) blends cosmic horror with a philosophical unravelling of authorship
• Elden Ring (2022) by FromSoftware demonstrates how a game can tell a thousand wordless stories with hand-crafted environments

→ games

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science :)

My PhD asks how the brain tunes the accuracy of memory recall on the go, by utilising a fast dopamine signal from the brainstem that modulates hippocampal activity. You can read more about my PhD work here.

I stumbled into neuroscience sideways: I started at Cambridge reading psychology, jumped ship to biological natural sciences in my second year, and ended up patching neurons in the Paulsen lab for my undergraduate thesis. My work so far has combined electrophysiology, optogenetics, two-photon imaging, behavioural analysis, end-to-end Python analysis pipelines, and computational modelling. A manuscript is in preparation.

Genetics Society Summer School, Edinburgh, 2018 I realised too late that I had forgotten to get a photo with the Fisher Lab members. I learned so much from such great people that summer at Queen Square.

Paulsen lab, Cambridge 2019. My first real lab. The late afternoon discussions of synaptic plasticity inspired so much of my neuroscience thinking, and my dear mentor showed me that electrophysiology is mostly patience.

Wang Lab, MPFI Where I came into the lab carrying my own question and acquired technical independence to chase it: behaviour rigs, two-photon imaging, and a lot of Python.

→ science

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music :)

amoxitoxin

My one-person prog-rock project. Some singles, 1 EP and 1 full-length album. Here is how I made my music, and you can find me on Bandcamp.

I listen to far more than I make, which is probably healthy. Prog used to be at the centre of everything: I grew up on Dream Theater, King Crimson, Genesis and Yes. But I have moved through Canterbury, jazz fusion, electronic etc., and now spend most of my listening time on a diverse roster of bands like Haken, Bent Knee, Sungazer, Keor, Alabama Shakes… Metal, post-rock, classical, and whatever else pulls me in on a given week fill the gaps. There are several hundred album reviews on the music page, but here are a few favourites of mine:

• If you like semi-heavy, mathy, intricate prog metal: The Mountain (2013) by Haken
• For classic prog from the olden days: Genesis’s Foxtrot (1972), or Gentle Giant’s Octopus (1972); despite both being prog and blowing my young mind as a kid, these great musicians went in completely different directions
• For jazz fusion: Snarky Puppy’s new album Somni (2025) is where I would start right now, or Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters (1973) if one fancies the genre’s foundational crossover into funk
• And if none of that works, try Keor’s Petrichor (2018): one person from Montpellier, fifty minutes of raw emotional power

→ music

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photos :)

I have photographed things compulsively since middle school, mostly out of an anxiety about losing the texture of precious moments. My dad gave me his Nikon D90 when I was old enough to care about framing, and that was when it became a practice rather than a reflex. I take long camera walks through cities, and places like Cambridge, London, Amman, and New York always surprise me with how alive our world is. On those walks, things keep making me stop: a window, a surface, a pattern of light that will dissipate in a few seconds and never to be seen again…

Different places trigger completely different instincts, but the impulse is always the same. Since the D90 I have had the honour to hold a Leica D-Lux 6, several Polaroids, and now a Lumix S5. I have a photo gallery here, and these are some photos I still look back on and smile at:

→ photos

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the zone :)

The Zone: The Braid. This interactive visualisation shows eight plotlines traced across all 73 episodes of Gravity's Rainbow (1973).

The Zone. I am building a computational visual companion to Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). So far, The Braid traces eight plotlines across seventy-three episodes. Planned sections include scene-level close readings, a visualisation of the protagonist’s dissolution of identity, and a character network analysis. The underlying corpus and pipeline are private, but the site publishes stripped, public-safe exports. In doing this computational literature analysis, I’ve realised that after seven Pynchon novels, I am still finding new threads.

→ the zone

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other stuff :)

First things first: there is a CV here.

My favourite chess puzzle of all time: it's mate in two, white to move. Rxa7 looks crushing, but after …O-O the Black king escapes. The key is Schrödinger's castle. Chess. I play at around 1800 Elo on Lichess and keep meaning to enter an OTB tournament. Here is a puzzle I like. Chess has somehow woven into my life a lot more deeply than I expected when starting out, and one of the events that have impacted me most in the past few years was the passing of GM Daniel (Danya) Naroditsky. I wrote a short remembrance of Danya, who taught me both how to play chess and how to be a good human being.

Travel. I travel whenever my studies let me. So far the photo gallery covers Cambridge, the rest of England and Scotland, Beijing, Jilin, southern China, Osaka, Singapore, Canada, the US east and west coasts, Chamonix, Italy, Lisbon, Jordan, and Georgia and the Caucasus. I keep wanting to see more of eastern, northern Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Languages. I am bilingual in Cantonese and Mandarin, grew up with English as a de facto third mother tongue, and have since picked up intermediate German and started on Spanish. But what I really love collecting is scripts: I taught myself to read Arabic, Georgian, Russian, and Japanese without being able to hold a conversation in any of them, simply because the letterforms were too beautiful for me to resist.