Headshot of Russell Poldrack.

Russell Poldrack

Cognitive neuroscientist
Stanford University

Russell Poldrack is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University in California and director of the Stanford Center for Open and Reproducible Science. His research uses a combination of neuroimaging, behavioral research and computational modeling to understand the brain systems underlying decision-making and cognitive control.

His lab also develops neuroinformatics tools to help improve the reproducibility and transparency of neuroscience, including the Openneuro and Neurovault data sharing projects and the fMRIPrep preprocessing workflow.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and did postdoctoral work at Stanford. He subsequently held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Stanford faculty in 2014. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Statistical Thinking: Analyzing Data in an Uncertain World.”

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of differing lines of data.

Eighteen teams analyzed the same neurophysiology dataset—and got wildly different answers

The “Brainhack” hackathon revealed that disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data.

By Gaëlle Chapuis, Mattia Chini
1 June 2026 | 7 min read
Research image of inputs into a single neuron in the mouse visual cortex.

‘Unbelievably beautiful’ evidence extends Nobel Prize-winning model of vision

Orientation tuning—the ability to distinguish a horizontal line from a vertical one or something in between—originates in the visual cortex, according to new mouse synapse imaging experiments.

By Claudia López Lloreda
29 May 2026 | 5 min read
Illustration of people connecting basic science.

Bringing basic biology back to INSAR

As the International Society for Autism Research has grown over the past two decades, basic science has become less central, Christine Wu Nordahl says. This year, she and other meeting organizers aimed to change that.

By Diana Kwon
28 May 2026 | 6 min read