Neurosalience #S4E3 with Russ Poldrack - Paradigm shifts and big picture challenges in fMRI

In this episode our guest is Dr. Russ Poldrack who has been so influential to the fields of fMRI, cognitive neuroscience, and brain imaging in general for the past 30+ years. Russ is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Open and Reproducible Science. Over the years, he has helped elevate how we do fMRI by creating resources and standards for sharing data and code. He is also working to advance the precision with which we think about task design and data interpretation through his Cognitive Atlas project, which is a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience.  

Russ Poldrack received his Bachelors in Psychology from Baylor University in 1989, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign in 1995. After a postdoc at Stanford, he started, in 1999, as an assistant professor at Harvard University and Mass General Hospital, in 2002 he moved to UCLA, then in 2009, he became the director of the imaging research center at the University of Texas at Austin. Finally, in 2014 he was recruited to Stanford, where he has been ever since. 

In this discussion, Peter and Russ look back into some of the paradigm shifts in fMRI best practices that Russ helped foster, as well as some of the big picture challenges that we face when using brain imaging, modeling, and precision task design to derive new insights into brain organization and mechanisms of computation. Here, Russ also weighs in on the prospects of fMRI for biomarker derivation and the exciting potential for single subject deep imaging. 

Peter mentioned to Russ that this was one of the fastest hours he has experienced in quite some time as it was an engrossing discussion.

Enjoy listening! 

Episode producers

Jeff Mentch

Omer Faruk Gulban

Brain Art

Artist: Mia Coutinho

Title: Represent, Connect, Empower