This site provides information about ongoing research in Jack Gallant’s cognitive, systems and computational neuroscience lab at UC Berkeley. Here you can find our cool interactive brain viewers, some of our published papers, information about the great people who do the work, our open data, open source code, and tutorials.

If you would like to know more about the general philosophy of the lab, please listen to this Freakonomics podcast interview with Jack Gallant or to these OHBM discussions between Peter Bandettini and Jack Gallant (discussion 1, discussion 2). If you would like to know more about our cutting-edge fMRI data analysis and modeling framework, voxelwise encoding models, please navigate to the Learn page.

We are recruiting postdocs!

We currently have openings for potential postdocs. If you are interested please contact Jack Gallant.

Latest News

December 17, 2025

Our awesome postdoc Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has uploaded his Naturalistic Navigation study as a preprint on bioRxiv. Participants performed a taxi driver task in a large virtual world. Voxelwise encoding models were used to fit 38 different feature spaces (comprising an astounding 28,134 distinct features) to the data. Results show that naturalistic navigation is supported by a network of 11 functionally distinct cortical regions that operate together to transform perceptual inputs through decision-making processes to produce action outputs. This paper really pushes the boundaries of what is possible in fMRI, no one has ever done anything at this scale before.

December 15, 2025

We've released Autoflatten, a Python pipeline for automatically flattening cortical surfaces generated by FreeSurfer. Prior to the development of this pipeline flattening was done largely by hand, an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating process. This new pipeline automates most of the work. Thanks to Dr. Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello for this great new tool!

December 14, 2025

Alicia Zeng has received her PhD! Congratulations Dr. Zeng!

December 8, 2025

Amanda LeBel has received her PhD! Congratulations Dr. LeBel! Amanda will be starting a postdoc in the lab of Prof. Anila D'Mello at UT Southwestern and UT Dallas early next year.

December 3, 2025

Fantastic news! Our former postdoc Prof. Fatma Deniz has just been elected President of the Technical University of Berlin! Congratulations President Deniz!

November 13, 2025

This new NeurIPS paper from Alicia Zeng presents an important new method for improving interpretation of neuroimaging experiments that use word embeddings as features.

September 17, 2025

Our latest review paper on the Voxelwise Encoding Model (VEM) framework from Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello and Fatma Deniz is now available as a preprint on PsyArXiv. This paper provides the first comprehensive guide for creating encoding models with fMRI data, and complements our VEM tutorials.

Find older news items here.