Shutian is a visual neuroscientist with expertise in human psychophysics and computational modeling. She received her PhD from New York University, where she studied the computational mechanisms underlying human visual perception, supported in part by an NIH F31 fellowship. Shutian joined the lab in August 2026, with the goal of combining her expertise in human vision, psychophysics, and behavioral modeling with neurophysiology and optogenetics to study primate perception and cognition. Her long-term goal is to understand the principles of neural population coding by integrating biological and computational approaches.