People

Members of the Poldrack Lab

Principal Investigator

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1995, and spent time as a postdoc at Stanford University and a faculty member at the MGH-NMR Center/Harvard Medical School before moving to UCLA in 2002. In 2009 I moved to the University of Texas at Austin to become Director of the Imaging Research Center and Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology.

My research interests are very generally centered around the questions of how new skills are acquired, how existing skills are expressed, and how people exert executive control during thought and behavior. We examine these questions using functional brain imaging techniques, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I am also interested in conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the relation between cognitive and neural processes. Our research is strongly focused on translation of basic cognitive neuroscience into the clinical domain, with collaborations on studies of schizophrenia, ADHD, Tourette Syndrome, and drug addiction.

Russell A. Poldrack

Russ' Curriculum Vitae Photos from recent travels Photos from older travels My Academic Family Tree

Faculty

	I received my PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan in 2006, where I worked with Tom Nichols on projects involving group BOLD fMRI data analysis as well as single subject Arterial Spin Labeling fMRI. My current focus is on developing a tool that will calculate power for group fMRI experiments, which will be helpful in designing future experiments.
Jeanette Mumford

Postdocs

I received my PhD from Stony Brook University in 2008, where I worked with Turhan Canli. My dissertation research focused on the neurogenetic bases of impulsivity, specifically response inhibition, in healthy adults. Working with both the Poldrack Lab at UT and Nelson Freimer’s Neurobehavioral Genetics lab at UCLA, I am interested in integrating neuroimaging and genetics to better understand cognitive control, particularly in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders. I am heavily involved in research that is part of the Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics at UCLA.

Eliza Congdon

	I received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from UT Austin in 2010, where I worked with Brad Love, Todd Maddox, and Alison Preston on projects related to category learning. My current research involves using cognitive models to interrogate imaging data from category learning and decision making experiments.
Tyler Davis

	After completion of PhD work under the supervision of Drs. Yasushi Miyashita and Seiki Konishi at the University of Tokyo School of Medicine, I worked with Dr. Todd S Braver at Washington University in St. Louis. I am interested in how executive functions interact with and/or contribute to decision-making.
Koji Jimura

I completed my PhD in Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Daphna Joel, co-supervised by John O'Doherty from Caltech and Trinity college Dublin. My dissertation research focused on reinforcement learning in the striatum: how these signals are correlated with learning in simple decision making in healthy subjects and how these signals are affected by the dopamine depletion in Parkinson's disease. In the Poldrack lab I am studying the connectivity profile of the reward-based decision making network and the relations between risky decision making and response inhibition.

Tom Schonberg

I received my Ph.D. in psychology from The Ohio State University with emphases in cognitive modeling, quantitative psychology, and clinical psychology under the guidance of Roger Ratcliff. I am broadly interested in understanding the processes underlying decision making, attention, and memory. I am also interested in the processing of emotional information and its relationship to psychological disorders associated with elevated levels of anxiety and depression. My research focuses on developing and testing quantitative models of cognitive processes, with the aim of using such models to provide theoretically-grounded interpretations of behavioral data. I look forward to incorporating fMRI techniques and analyses into this framework by using imaging data to inform and constrain cognitive models, and conversely using cognitive models as bridges between behavioral and imaging data.

Corey White

Graduate Students

I am a graduate student in the Neuroscience (INS) program. I graduated in 2006 with an Sc.B. from Brown University. I then joined Dr. Brad Dickerson's neuroimaging lab at MGH in Boston where we used structural MRI to identify the anatomic effects of aging and neurodegenerative disease. In the Poldrack lab, I am interested in investigating ways to influence human behavior during decision making using behavioral paradigms and fMRI.

Akram Bakkour

I am a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience area at UT-Austin. My general research interest is how people make decisions in various contexts. I got my master degree in visual neuroscience at National Taiwan University, where I studied facial expression classification with psychophysics models. I hope to combine mathematical models and fMRI techniques to explore the neural mechanisms of perceptual, economic, and social decision-making in the Poldrack lab.

Mei-Yen Chen

I'm a graduate student in the cognitive neuroscience area at UCLA. I received my Sc.B. from Brown University in 2002, after which I worked in Jeremy Wolfe's Visual Attention Lab at Harvard Medical School and in Aude Oliva's Computational Visual Cognition Lab at MIT, studying contextual constraints on visual perception. I am interested in neural mechanisms of cognitive control, and my current project addresses control of memory systems using fMRI.

Naomi Kenner

	I entered the INS graduate program in 2009. Prior to joining the Poldrack lab, I studied neural representation of complex objects in Leslie Ungerleider's laboratory at the NIMH. I received a B.A. in Cognitive and Neuroscience Studies from Macalester College in 2007. I am interested in neural mechanisms of perception and cognition, economic decisions, and brain connectivity.
Nick Malecek

Staff

I am a Research Assistant at UT Austin's Imaging Research Center. I graduated from Portland State University in 2007 with a B.S. in Psychology as well as a B.S. in General Sciences. After receiving my degree, I worked for two years as an RA at Oregon Health and Science University. I worked in both the Department of Biomedical Engineering, under the direction of Tamara Hayes and in the Alzheimer's Disease Center, under the direction of Jeffrey Kaye, where we studied the behavioral and cognitive effects of aging. My future goals are to become a part UT Austin's INS graduate program.

Brenda Gregory

Lab Alumni

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