Russell Poldrack

Russell Poldrack
Imaging Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
Austin, USA

Keynote lecture

Will talk about: Cognitive Neuroinformatics

Bio sketch:

Russ Poldrack received his Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, and held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and UCLA before becoming Director of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  His research using neuroimaging to understand the neural basis of decision making, executive function, and learning.  He has also written extensively on conceptual and analytic issues regarding fMRI. In addition, he is deeply involved in the development of informatics resources for cognitive neuroscience, including the Cognitive Atlas project and the OpenFMRI project.  His research has received awards from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and American Psychological Association, and in 2009 he served as Chair of the OHBM.  He is as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and has served on the editorial boards for Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cerebral Cortex, Human Brain Mapping, Cognitive Science, and Neuroimage.

Talk abstract:

We are drowning in results from neuroimaging studies, but starving for an understanding of how these results inform brain function. I will describe an emerging ecosystem of neuroinformatics resources that are aimed at better understanding the relations between mental processes and brain function. Data mining tool such as Neurosynth.org and Pubbrain.org provide the means to integrate massive literatures to obtain better estimates of associations between brain activity and mental function. Ontologies of mental function, such as the Cognitive Atlas, aim to provide a more formal linkage between psychological processes and the tasks used to measure them. Data sharing projects, such as the OpenfMRI project, aim to provide the means to more deeply mine the relation between broad sets of mental processes and brain function. Together, these tools are beginning to provide the means to make sense of the rapidly growing neuroimaging literature.