The University of Texas at Austin · Psychology & Neuroscience
We study how the brain's connections support perception, learning, and memory. We also build the open software and data infrastructure that neuroscientists need to do this kind of work, and we work on the rules for sharing brain data across countries.
Two research programs
We study brain connections and how they implement perception, cognition, and learning, in health and disease. We combine multimodal data with computational methods to understand how brain connections are organized and how that organization relates to brain function. In parallel, we develop data-science technology that extends what can be studied with brain data. In the era of artificial intelligence, our ability to understand the brain can be greatly augmented, if it is done responsibly.
The brain works like the internet: long-range axonal connections link neurons in distant areas, and nothing works without them. This network infrastructure is not fixed. It changes with learning, during development, and as a result of aging and disease.
News
Our Perspective on brain-data sovereignty, with the BRIDGE partners, is out in Nature Neuroscience. It argues that neuroscience needs an international coordinating body for data and proposes seven governance instrumen...
Franco Pestilli gave an invited talk, “Building a BRAIN Knowledge Base,” at the bi-annual meeting of the NIH BRAIN Initiative in Bethesda.
Human tractography has never been checked against the axons it claims to trace. We are building the ground truth, and the wiring diagram that follows from it.
The visual system is the best-mapped part of the primate brain. We use it to find the rules by which maps of the visual world are wired to one another.
Reading and arithmetic change the brain's long-range pathways. We follow children scan by scan through a school year to see which pathways change, when, and whether the change is specific to the skill.
Analyses that stay executable, data that stay standardized, and AI agents that leave a verifiable trace: the engineering behind reproducible neuroscience.
Brain data are becoming a regulated, strategic resource. We study how governance works in practice and build the agreements and software that keep collaborations legal across borders.
How we work
We release our data, methods, and software so that others can re-run our analyses, check them, and build on them. An imaging study that cost years and millions of dollars should be reusable.
Our team and partners are in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. We think this makes the science better and the tools more useful outside a single institution.
Our platforms and courses are used to teach neuroscience and data science at smaller U.S. colleges and in Africa and Latin America, where students would otherwise have no access to this kind of computing.