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
One program asks how axonal connections and white matter support perception and cognition across development, learning, aging, and injury. We map the brain’s wiring from single axons up to the long-range pathways that MRI can measure in living people.
The other program builds the technology this work needs: cloud computing, data standards, provenance, AI agents, and governance for sharing brain data internationally. The tools make the experiments possible, and the experiments show us what the tools need to do next.
The wiring of the brain is not fixed. How it is organized before learning predicts what can be learned, and how it changes during learning shows what has been retained.
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.
We are building the human brain's wiring diagram from the axons up, connecting microscopy of single axons to the MRI we can collect in living people.
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.
White matter predicts how well a person will learn and changes as they do. We study this in children learning to read and do math, in aging, and in recovery from injury.
We build the cloud platforms, data standards, provenance systems, and AI agents that let neuroscience be reproduced at scale, and we run them for the community.
Countries are treating brain data as strategic assets. We work on the frameworks, legal tools, and technology that let international collaboration continue.
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.