Xiao-Jing Wang obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Free University of Brussels in 1987, at which point he switched to the nascent field of Computational Neuroscience. Wang has served on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, Brandeis University and Yale University; he has also been a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recently, he moved from Yale to join the Center for Neural Science at New York University.