Psychology Researcher Awarded $300K Searle Grant to Study Human Cognition

A faculty member in the University of Maryland’s Department of Psychology is among 15 recently appointed assistant professors nationwide who will receive $300,000 to pursue groundbreaking research in chemistry and the biomedical sciences as 2025 honorees of the Searle Scholars Program.

Weizhen “Zane” Xie was selected from 194 nominees representing 145 universities and research institutions to be recognized by the Searle Scholars Program. Funded through the Searle Funds at the Chicago Community Trust and administered by Kinship Foundation. It is designed to support high-risk, high-reward research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.

“I’m deeply honored and truly grateful—it means a great deal to me as an early-career scientist,” said Xie. “The encouragement and support from this program will help me take important first steps toward new research directions, with the hope of making meaningful contributions to our field.”

Xie will use his three-year Searle Scholar funding on a project to understand how single neurons in the human brain represent complex information—such as the semantic knowledge that links concepts and ideas in our mind. By studying how they are encoded at the level of individual brain cells, his project could shed light on how our brains organize knowledge and how problems in these processes might contribute to memory disorders.

One of Xie’s nominators to become a Searle Scholar, Dr. Kareem Zaghloul from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said Xie’s work “may have the potential to advance our understanding of the neuronal basis of human intelligence, addressing critical gaps in neuroscience that may not be resolved by animal research alone.”