I am seeking internship opportunities (starting now) as well as postdoctoral and industry positions (starting Summer 2026), with interests in understanding LLMs (beyond mechanistic details), or exploring how LLMs can enhance collective decision-making (and inform policy), or aligning LLMs with human priors and the ultimate good values (do such values exist?), or using mechanistic insights from LLMs and neural network theory to expand the space of cognitive hypotheses.

I use models to understand behaviors of both biological and artificial agents and explore how computation could be implemented in neural networks. Following the release of GPT-4, my research interest has partially shifted towards understanding the emergence of intelligence within large language models.

My current research interests include:

• Use recurrent neural network as cognitive model to identify the hidden variables in decision-making across species.
• Examine the ways prior information could be encoded in working memory system through optimization-based neural network models.
• Investigate how humans utilize language as a tool of control and agency through dialogue.

About me

I am a first year PhD student in the Cognition and Neural Systems Program at the University of Arizona. I work with Robert Wilson. Prior to my PhD, I worked with Xue-Xin Wei at UT Austin, and Da-Hui Wang at Beijing Normal University. Before that, I used EEG to study working memory. Before that, I studied counseling psychology with a focus on cognitive behavioral therapy.

The pronunciation of my name is “HWAH-doang SHAWNG”.

Some of my writing

I am addicted to explore complex ideas. I write some my controversial thoughts on how we understand the world around us. See Blog Posts. I hope you find these ideas interesting! Feel free to share your thoughts or comments with me via email—I’d love to hear your perspective.

Some interesting facts:

• I enjoyed reading when I was young. My favorite writers are James Joyce, Milan Kundera, Jorge Borges, Franz Kafka , Dostoyevsky and Edgar Allan Poe.
• This stupid username was set when I was a teenager, came from Saki and Márquez.
• Yet I didn’t read much after high school. Suddenly lose my patience with long books.
• I am addicted to computer games, but only when there is an exam approaching. Since there are few exams I should take, I seldom play them now.
• I enjoy skiing, sick jokes and embarrassing short videos.
• Using a second language is painful for me, mostly because I can’t help being sarcastic but I can’t do it well in English.
• I am bad at calculating. I often mess up with single digit calculations, even with a pen and paper. This always makes me doubt myself as a researcher in computational neuroscience. (But large language models also fail to do simple calculations, I am not alone)