Prof. Josh Neudorf

I am an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Athabasca University, Adjunct Professor in Psychology at the University of Alberta, and Faculty Member of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute at the University of Alberta. I received my PhD in Psychology with a focus on Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Saskatchewan under the supervision of Dr. Ron Borowsky. This work focused on demonstrating how structural connectivity guides and constrains functional outputs including functional connectivity. Most notably, I demonstrated a near doubling in accuracy compared to previous international attempts when predicting functional connectivity from structural connectivity, using Graph Neural Network Deep Learning (Neudorf et al., 2022). I was honoured to be awarded the prestigious Governor General’s Gold Medal for my PhD work. I then spent 3 years supervised by Dr. Randy McIntosh at Simon Fraser University’s Institute for Neuroscience & Neurotechnology as a Postdoctoral Fellow funded by NSERC and the Canadian Neuroanalytics Scholars Program, applying graph theory and other computational approaches to studying the structural and functional brain network changes across the lifespan from child development to older age that serve to support cognitive ability.

Our lab’s research uses neuroimaging methods including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate how the structural and functional brain networks are related to one another and how these networks support cognitive processes involved in reading, semantic memory, and attention across the lifespan. This research combines methods from Psychology, Neuroscience, Mathematics, and Computer Science. More specifically, this research relies on cognitive neuroscience, computational neuroscience, complex systems theory, graph theory, deep learning, computational simulations, etc.

I have been invited to present my research nationally and internationally, and have been asked to serve as Consulting Editor for the journal Cortex, external committee member for NSF CAREER, and regularly as a reviewer for peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Scientific Reports, Imaging Neuroscience, Network Neuroscience, Cortex, Brain Imaging and Behaviour, PLOS Computational Biology, etc.

I am looking for new students. You can be supervised at either Athabasca University or the University of Alberta. If interested, please reach out with a copy of your CV and a description of how our research interests could align.

Research Interests

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Network Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Reading
• Semantic Memory
• Attention
• Aging

Educational Credentials

• 2022 PhD, Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Saskatchewan
• 2019 MA, Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Saskatchewan
• 2017 BSc Honours, Psychology, University of Saskatchewan