During January 2025, Zifang Zhao focused on improving data preprocessing workflows in the ayalab1/neurocode repository. He addressed a critical bug in the concatenateDats.m script by replacing a fixed-length substring extraction with a robust regular expression approach, enabling accurate extraction of recording times from filenames regardless of milliseconds or filesystem format variations. This MATLAB-based solution enhanced the reliability of downstream data concatenation and timing analyses, reducing data drift across runs. Zifang’s work demonstrated depth in scripting and regular expressions, resulting in improved data integrity and stability for preprocessing pipelines, even though no new features were delivered during this period.