Russ Poldrack
Professor at Stanford. Psychology/Neuroscience/Data Science. Books include: The New Mind Readers, Handbook of fMRI Data Analysis, Hard to Break, and Statistical Thinking.
poldrack.github.io
- The 21st century version of William Gibson’s “meat puppet” has arrived: rentahuman.ai
- Metadata, data documentation, and provenance russpoldrack.substack.com/p/metadata-d... the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series.
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackA new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackWashU PNP postdoc app just went live! They have 1 opening this year. I absolutely LOVED my time at WashU and I loved living in St. Louis. It's an amazing place to study and live.
- Data Organization Schemes russpoldrack.substack.com/p/data-organ... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- This is a really fun story - thanks to @thetransmitter.bsky.social for telling it so well!
- When a brain researcher solved a logistical problem by going rogue, the idea proved remarkably infectious. By @lyrebard.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackI met @russpoldrack.org after this effort and before I knew this particular story. I was blown away when I first read about it. Some scientific efforts “expand the domain of the understandable”. This was one of them. So great to see it profiled by @thetransmitter.bsky.social!
- When a brain researcher solved a logistical problem by going rogue, the idea proved remarkably infectious. By @lyrebard.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...
- Network/graph data and other specialized data types russpoldrack.substack.com/p/networkgra... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- "For the past few months, I’ve been running an experiment that felt both thrilling and vaguely unsettling: could I automate myself? And what would that mean for the future of academic research like mine?" freesystems.substack.com/p/the-100x-r...
- Reposted by Russ Poldrack
@russpoldrack.org convincing you to prefer zarr over HDF5 in about 10 lines of code. Thanks Russ!- Data formats and file types: Multidimensional array data russpoldrack.substack.com/p/data-forma... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- Data formats and file types: Multidimensional array data russpoldrack.substack.com/p/data-forma... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- This was really fun to write with @patrickbissett.bsky.social - Always great when you can give back to the folks who helped you get where you are.
- Wow, I've never seen anything like this from an LLM before (Claude Opus 4.1):
- Join me on a deep dive into tabular data formats and file types: russpoldrack.substack.com/p/data-forma... the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackEver wondered how white matter tracts actually map onto the cortical hierarchy and cognition—beyond the usual “projection vs association” labels? Our new preprint tackles exactly that! 🧠✨ doi.org/10.64898/202... Thread below 🧵
- Managing original data and data access russpoldrack.substack.com/p/managing-o... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series (and the last for 2025 - happy new year everyone!)
- File systems, object stores, and databases - oh my! russpoldrack.substack.com/p/storing-re... The latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- "Never commit code you can’t explain." substack.com/home/post/p-... - great piece by @addyosmani.bsky.social
- First section of a new chapter on Data Management in my Better Code, Better Science series: russpoldrack.substack.com/p/data-manag...
- Reposted by Russ Poldrack@russpoldrack.org's guidelines for AI-assisted coding can help researchers ensure the integrity of their work while accelerating progress on important scientific questions. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...
- AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i... - my latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social
- Version control and Jupyter notebooks russpoldrack.substack.com/p/version-co... the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series.
- Best practices for using Jupyter notebooks russpoldrack.substack.com/p/best-pract... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
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- Mixing languages using Jupyter notebooks russpoldrack.substack.com/p/mixing-lan... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- One of the best things about AI coding tools is that I no longer have to endure frustration trying to figure out how to parse XML files and write SQL queries.
- Very cool new work from the Iglesias group at MGH: A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation (also available at OpenNeuro - openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...) : www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- This is a great piece by @cbo.bsky.social on the need to rethink tenure. undark.org/2025/09/11/o...
- Computational notebooks - the first in a set of posts on this topic. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/computatio...
- Project structure for scientific coding projects - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series open.substack.com/pub/russpold...
- It's really nice when people actually use software that you create. This is an updated usage figure for the MRIQC.org Web API showing continued usage for the last 7 years, with more than half a million unique BOLD images in BIDS datasets! If you aren't already using MRIQC, check it out!
- Using containers for reproducible computing russpoldrack.substack.com/p/using-cont... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackOur new paper is out! It offers a tool to assess collinearity impact on contrast estimates *and* uses simulations + MID data to show how common collinearity avoidance strategies can bias results. Huge thanks to @russpoldrack.org , M Demidenko, and the ABCD folks. 🔗 direct.mit.edu/imag/article...
- If you use the Monetary Incentive Delay task or any task with complex events in fMRI, you should read this. We demonstrate that common modeling approaches can result in bias due to omitted variables. By @jeanette-mumford.bsky.social & the ABCD task fMRI team. direct.mit.edu/imag/article...
- Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social
- The goals of a scientific software project - the first section from a new chapter on Project Structure and Management in Better Code, Better Science. open.substack.com/pub/russpold...
- Great piece by @natolambert.bsky.social on the current state of human exhaustion in the AI world. Makes this important point:
- Apple's Mail.app AI summaries have officially become useless.
- If you are on the job market this fall, listen to this! The tips here are great for everyone, not just for quant folks. I have a couple of additional comments:
- OpenNeuro @openneuro.bsky.social just hit a huge milestone: 1500 datasets! Congrats to the team on making this project so successful over the last 7 years.
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackPope Leo quotes Hannah Arendt: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist." www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...
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- Reposted by Russ PoldrackWhen @laurapritschet.bsky.social & Pavel Shapturenka set out to build the 28&Me + 28&He datasets, I don't think any of us could've predicted the spectacularly creative ways the datasets would be used years later. That's the power of open science. 👇🏼
- This is pretty hilarious github.com/TomLefley/i-...
- A better way to track problem solving during agentic coding - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series russpoldrack.substack.com/p/a-better-w... - I have found this relatively simple approach to work very well.
- I know that citation statistics are faulty indicator, but I have to say that there is something humbling in knowing that people have decided 100,000 times to cite a paper that I was involved in.
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackMy mom called me last night about the Kimmel firing, saying "This is how Hitler got started!" I quickly responded, "By firing the late night tv hosts?" Turns out, mom was right.
- These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...
- I have just dropped a new version of my academicdb project, which helps prolific researchers generate a CV automatically. Now with a web interface! If you are interested, please try it out and let me know what you think - it takes a bit of setup work but then runs easily using Docker.
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- Reposted by Russ PoldrackCan large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵
- I am really glad that I'm not playing a drinking game where I have to drink every time Claude Code says "You're absolutely right!" because I would probably be dead from alcohol poisoning.
- Reposted by Russ PoldrackA free and democratic society cannot silence comedians because the President doesn’t like what they say. This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.
