Dr. Shi is a Principal Investigator at the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (IIIS), University of Tsukuba, Japan. He received his PhD in Medicine from the University of Tokyo in 2017 and subsequently worked there as an Assistant Professor until 2022, when he established his independent research group at Tsukuba.
His research asks why animals need sleep and how the brain balances its capacity to change with the need to remain stable. He combines molecular genetics, experimental neuroscience, mathematical modelling and large-scale data analysis to study sleep in mice, ants and humans. His work investigates how synapses regulate sleep, how sleep shapes memory, and how these insights could improve AI performance.