Chao Dong joined the Adaptive Brain Lab as a postdoctoral research associate in September 2024. Her research focuses on neuroimaging and machine learning applications in human brain ageing. At the Adaptive Brain Lab, she employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining neuroimaging, genetics, cognition, and machine learning techniques to identify biomarkers for the early detection of brain and mental health disorders.

Chao received her PhD from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia in 2024, where she was awarded the Scientia Ph.D. Scholarship. During her time at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) in UNSW, she worked under the guidance of Wei Wen, Karen A. Mather, Anbupalam Thalamuthu, Perminder S. Sachdev, and Jiyang Jiang. Her doctoral research utilized brain MRI data, genetic data, and other multimodal datasets, applying advanced artificial intelligence methods, particularly deep learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to explore the genetic and environmental influences on human brain changes in ageing.