Look, this page is where we share things we’re proud of an excited about. Go ahead and insert 2-4 exclamation marks at the end of each item here and that’ll be about the right level of enthusiasm.
Sep: Brad was elected to be an Advisory Council Member for the San Diego Fleet Science Center
Sep: Eena Kosik-Rose and Brad Voytek’s research was profiled in Nautilus Magazine, “The Rhythm of Your Breath Leaves a Fingerprint on Your Thoughts” (link) and San Diego’s KPBS, “Gasp! Even a slight change in breathing impacts human brain activity” (link)
Aug: Eena Kosik-Rose successfully defended her PhD
Aug: Dillan Cellier successfully defended her PhD
Aug: Brad did an hourlong interview with the KPBS Cinema Junkie: The ‘Undead’ Podcast about zombie brains (link)
Jun: Christian Cazares received the 2026 UC Alianza MX Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
May: Incoming Cognitive Science PhD student, Katie Warren, received a Eugene Cota-Robles Award
May: Christian Cazares received a Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind Innovative Research Grant
Apr: Liz Kaplan received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship honorable mention
Feb: The lab’s first patent application, “Novel electrocardiogram waveform parameterization for cardiac health,” has been filed (link)
Feb: Christian Cazares was named a Fellow of the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society
Nov: Christian Cazares was named one of the The Transmitter ’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience
Nov: Brad is Chairing the 2025 JupyterCon Conference in San Diego
Nov: Quirine van Engen successfully defended her PhD
Oct: MJ Preston successfully defended his PhD
Sep: Three of Brad’s “lab hacks” were featured in Nature’s article, “These 99 ‘lab hacks’ will make your scientific work easier” (link)
Aug: Christian Cazares won the Henry Grass Rising Stars in Neuroscience Award
Jul: Former lab PhD student Richard Gao is joining the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Department of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assitant Professor for Machine Learning of World Models
Jun: Quirine van Engen received the UC San Diego Cognitive Science Leadership Award
May: Andrew Bender successfully defended his PhD
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
Mar: Sydney Smith successfully defended her PhD
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
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)
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
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
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)
Oct: Richard Gao also successfully defended his PhD
Sep: Tom Donoghue successfully defended his PhD
Apr: Software developer Ryan Hammonds joined the lab
Dec: Our Cell: Stem Cell paper with collaborator Alysson Muotri, was selected by Discover as #7 in their top science stories of 2019 (link)
Dec: Tammy Tran successfully defended her PhD
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
Jan: Scott Cole successfully defended his PhD
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
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
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
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)
Dec: Brad Voytek’s “Scientific Resolutions for 2015” are in livescience