Jialiang was born and grew up in Wuhan, China. Funded by a full DAAD-scholarship from the German government, he received a bachelor and master's degree in Biology in Freiburg and Munich, respectively. He became interested in the mechanisms of brain activity and was attracted by the unique environment of Caltech. He is now a new graduate student in the Computation and Neural Systems Program, focusing on the encoding and processing of information in the brain. He is in Doris Tsao's lab that moved to the University of California, Berkeley.