Lab News

2025

Jun: Quirine van Engen received the UC San Diego Cognitive Science Leadership Award!

Apr: Brad Voytek joins the Advisory Committee for the Comic-Con Museum (501(c)(3) non-profit)!

Apr: Former lab PhD student Tom Donoghue accepted a job as Lecturer of Cognitive Neuroscience (equivalent to tenure-track Assistant Professor) at the University of Manchester in the UK!

Mar: Eena Kosik was awarded a UC San Diego Rita L. Atkinson Graduate Fellowship!

Jan: Both Christian Cazares and Brad Voytek recieved a UC San Diego Division of Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs Award for Advancing Equity in Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Training.

2024

Jun: Lab undergraduate researcher Cassidy Lu received the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Distinguished Undergraduate Research in Cognitive Science!

May: Brad Voytek was the Keynote commencement speaker for the UC Berkeley Cognitive Science undergraduate graduation! You can read his speech here.

Apr: Sydney Smith got the UC San Diego Leon Thal Research Excellence Award for neuroscience!

Apr: Morgan Fitzgerald received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship honorable mention!

Mar: Sydney Smith and Brad Voytek’s research was profiled in Quanta Magazine, “Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Explain Value of Shock Therapy” (link).

2023

Aug: Postdoc Christian Cazares has joined the lab! Christian is an NIH funded researcher through a K00 award, and he has also received an NIH/NIGMS Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award.

Jun: The lab has been awarded an amazingly generous $500,000 gift from a private donor to help us continue with our open-source neural data science research and education efforts!

Jun: Postdoc Pamelea Riviere has joined the lab! Pam has won multiple fellowships and awards for her work in the lab, including the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and an NIH/NIGMS Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award.

May: Eena Kosik won a Kavli Institute Innovative Research Grant!

Apr: MJ Preston won the UC San Diego Neurosciences Graduate Program Leadership Award!

2022

Nov: Dr. Voytek is serving as a Co-investigator on the $7,838,044 NIH Office of the Director OT2 award, “Multimodal Atlas of Disease for Artificial Intelligence: Generating datasets for pseudotime manifolds of health trajectories (MAD-AI)” led by UC San Diego Prof. Sally Baxter.

Sep: The lab ran a day-long invited workshop at the Society for Psychophysiological Research in Vancouver, Canada on our research methods. Those tutorials are available on the lab GitHub here.

Jun: Brad Voytek was promoted to Professor! (But wasn’t he already a “professor” you ask? Titles are weird!)

Mar: Lab undergraduate researcher Angela Chapman received a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship!

2021

May: Richard Gao was awarded a UC San Diego Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal.

Apr: Brad Voytek joins the Neuromatch Academy (501(c)(3) non-profit) as their Chief Professional Development Officer

Feb: Natalie Schaworonkow and Brad Voytek’s research was profiled in Quanta Magazine, “Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries” (link).

2020

Oct: Richard Gao also successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations to Dr. Gao!

Sep: Tom Donoghue successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations to Dr. Donoghue!

Apr: Software developer Ryan Hammonds joined the lab.

2019

Dec: Our Cell: Stem Cell paper with collaborator Alysson Muotri, was selected by Discover as #7 in their top science stories of 2019 (link).

Sep: Brad Voytek Co-founds the Data Science Alliance (501(c)(3) non-profit) and joins as a founding Board Member.

Aug: Richard Gao is profiled in the New York Times for our work with collaborator Alysson Muotri, “Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves?” (link).

Aug: Post-doc Stephanie Martin has joined the lab!

Apr: Post-doc Stephanie Martin was named one of the inaugural HDSI Postdoctoral Fellows!

Apr: Brad Voytek was interviewed by the New York Times about recent research looking into noninvasive brain stimulation to improve working memory in older adults.

Apr: Post-doc Natalie Schaworonkow has joined the lab!

2018

Sep: Lab undergraduate researchers Geeling Chau, Jairo Chavez, Lauren Liao, Luyanda Mdanda, and Sashaank Pasumarthi were all selected for the inaugural Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute Data Science Research Fellowship!

Jun: Brad Voytek was named the inaugural Fellow (equivalent to endowed chair): of the UC San Diego Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI)

May: Brad Voytek was promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure. Phew!

Apr: Sydney Smith joins the lab as the lab manager!

2017

Sep: Brad Voytek was profiled in Scientific American: “Scientists: Advertise Your Failures!”

Sep: Tammy Tran received a UCSD-NIH Institute for Neural Computation Training Grant in Cognitive Neurosciences!

Feb: Brad Voytek was profiled by UC Berkeley.

Jan: Tom Donoghue received a Cognitive Neuroscience Society Graduate Student Award!

2016

Nov: Brad Voytek was elected to be the Chair for the National Academy of Sciences, Kavli Frontiers of Science (KFoS) symposium.

Jun: Richard Gao was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Doctoral Graduate Scholarship!

May: Tammy Tran won a Kavli Institute Innovative Research Grant!

Feb: Brad Voytek won a Computational and Systems Neuroscience (Cosyne) New Attendee Travel Award!

2015

Nov: Brad Voytek was elected to be the Neurosciences Organizing Member for the National Academy of Sciences, Kavli Frontiers of Science (KFoS) symposium.

Nov: Brad Voytek was elected to be a National Academy of Sciences, Kavli Fellow.

Sep: Brad Voytek’s essay on the death of Oliver Sacks is published in Wired (link).

Apr: Brad Voytek was interviewed by the New York Times about recent breakthroughs in the neurophysiology of Parkinson’s Disease.

Feb: Brad Voytek was recently named as a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience!

Feb: Congratulations to Richard Gao, first-year Cognitive Science PhD student in our lab, for winning a Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program (FISP) award!

Jan: Congratulations to the students of UC San Diego for founding the Data Science Student Society (DS3)!

2014

Dec: Brad Voytek’s “Scientific Resolutions for 2015” are in livescience.