Teaching
Courses and programs
We teach cognitive neuroscience and data science at UT Austin. The courses are hands-on: students work with original research data, write and run analysis code, and use the same cloud platform the lab uses for research. We care about three things in the classroom: practical skills, active learning, and the theory that makes the skills transferable.
Behavioral and Social Data Science major
UT Austin · 2020–
We were part of the task force that created the major and we developed its two foundations courses, Foundations of Behavioral Data Science I and II. Students learn statistics, programming, and reproducible analysis on real behavioral and brain data from the first week.
Cognitive Neuroscience Abroad
University of Geneva, Campus Biotech · Maymester
A four-week study-abroad program in cognitive neuroscience that Franco Pestilli created and teaches. Students take the course at Campus Biotech in Geneva, visit laboratories, and do a research project.
Open course materials
Psychological Data Science on GitHub · MIT license
The complete materials for Foundations of Psychological Data Science I and II are public, as Jupyter notebooks anyone can run, reuse, or teach from. The course was recognized with a UT Libraries Open Science Fellowship. Our cloud platform is also used for course-based undergraduate research at colleges without computing of their own, in the United States, Africa, and Latin America.
Courses
What we have taught
The University of Texas at Austin
| Course | Level | When |
|---|---|---|
| Cognitive Neuroscience | Undergraduate | Fall, 2024– |
| Cognitive Neuroscience Abroad (Geneva | Undergraduate | Maymester, 2025– |
| Foundations of Behavioral Data Science I | Undergraduate | Fall, 2022–2024 |
| Foundations of Behavioral Data Science II | Undergraduate | Spring, 2023– |
| Scientific Rigor and Transparency (T32 program course) | Graduate | Fall, 2020–2025 |
| Digital Neuroanatomy | Graduate | Spring 2021 |
| Lab in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience | Graduate | Fall, 2020–2021 |
Indiana University
| Course | Level | When |
|---|---|---|
| Cognitive Psychology | Undergraduate | 2017–2020 |
| Statistics | Undergraduate | 2015–2016 |
Stanford University
| Course | Level | When |
|---|---|---|
| Statistics and data science for neuroimaging | Graduate | 2013–2014 |