Who we are

Franco Pestilli

Professor, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin

Professor of Psychology and, by courtesy, Neuroscience at The University of Texas at Austin. He studies how the brain’s structural connections support perception, learning, and development, and builds the computational methods and infrastructure needed to map the human brain and analyze neuroimaging data at scale. He is a member of the Center for Perceptual Systems and the Center for Learning and Memory.

He founded and directs brainlife.io, an open cloud platform for neuroscience, and leads the Axonal Projectome Exchange (APEX), the data coordination center of the NIH BRAIN CONNECTS program (brain-connects.org), as well as BRIDGE (bridge.incf.org), a Wellcome Trust program on international brain-data governance. He chairs the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility and serves on the steering committee of the Brain Imaging Data Structure.

He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Psychonomic Society, and has received the Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, the Kavli Foundation’s support, and the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award. He trained at La Sapienza University of Rome, New York University, Columbia University, and Stanford University, and was faculty at Indiana University before joining UT Austin, where he teaches data science and cognitive neuroscience and directs a study abroad program in Geneva.