專業
Dr. Zai-Fu Yao (姚在府) is an Associate Professor in the College of Education and the Director of the Research Center for Education and Mind Sciences at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Taiwan, where he leads the Agile Brain and Cognition (ABC) Laboratory. He holds joint faculty appointments across the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, the Department of Sports Science, the Interdisciplinary Program of Education, the Ph.D. Program in Precision Medicine, and the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Medicine (School of Medicine). He also serves as Deputy Secretary-General of the Taiwanese Psychological Association (TPA). Dr. Yao earned his M.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience from National Central University and his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognition from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Dr. Yao’s research program sits at the intersection of Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Brain Connectomics, Neuroimaging Genomics, and Neuroeducation. By integrating multimodal human neuroimaging (fMRI, dMRI/DTI, high-density EEG, and fNIRS), eye-tracking, wearable biometric sensing, and translational animal models with multivariate decoding (MVPA/RSA), graph-theoretic connectomics, and brain-gene-imaging mapping, his laboratory investigates how the human brain adapts across the lifespan. His work spans elite and Olympic athletes, gifted learners, Indigenous communities, individuals exposed to early-life adversity, and aging or clinical populations with mild cognitive impairment (MCI)—translating mechanistic discoveries in frontal-lobe network organization, spatial navigation, executive control, and motor imagery into real-world educational frameworks, aquatic literacy, and precision brain health interventions.
Recognized with the NTHU Young Scholar Research Award and the Sports Science Research and Development Excellence Award from Taiwan's Ministry of Sports, Dr. Yao's work has been featured on the cover of Cerebral Cortex and in international science media. He serves as a Consulting Editor for Biological Psychology and as an Editorial Board Member for PLOS ONE (Aging and Health), Discover Mental Health (Springer Nature), and Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. Core Research Pillars: Cognitive Neuroscience; Computational Brain Connectomics; Neuroimaging Genomics; Neuroeducation; Lifespan Neuroplasticity; Multimodal Neuroimaging; Spatial Cognition and Navigation; Sports Neuropsychology.