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Bradley Voytek

Professor and Chair

Research Interests

Bradley Voytek is a Professor and Department Chair of Cognitive Science, and Professor in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and the Neurosciences Graduate Program at UC San Diego. He’s an Alfred P. Sloan Neuroscience Research Fellow and a Kavli Fellow of the National Academies of Sciences, as well as a founding faculty member of the UC San Diego Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and the Undergraduate Data Science program. After his PhD at UC Berkeley, he joined Uber as their first data scientist – when it was a 10-person startup – where he helped build their data science strategy and team. His research lab combines large-scale data science and machine learning to understand how neurons communicate, and how the brain and body interact, with a particular focus on mitigating the impact of aging and disease on health and wellbeing.

He is an advocate for promoting science to the public and speaks extensively with students at all grade levels about the joys of scientific research and discovery. In addition to his academic publications, his outreach work has appeared in outlets ranging from Scientific American and NPR to the San Diego Comic-Con. He is currently writing a book with neuroscientist Ashley Juavinett regarding the powerful future of data science in neuroscience discovery, though his most important contribution to science is his book with fellow neuroscientist Tim Verstynen, "Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?", by Princeton University Press.

Selected Publications

You can view my full CV here. (*,# denote equal contribution)
  • van Engen Q, Chau G, Smith A, Adam K, Donoghue T, Voytek B. Dissociating contributions of theta and alpha oscillations from aperiodic neural activity in human visual working memory. J Neurosci (2026) (paper forthcoming)
  • Monchy N*, Duprez J*, Houvenaghel JF, Legros A, Voytek B#, Modolo J#. Functional connectivity is dominated by aperiodic, rather than oscillatory, coupling. J Neurosci (2025) (paper) 
  • Preston MJ, Schaworonkow N, Voytek B. Time-resolved aperiodic and oscillatory dynamics during human visual memory encoding. J Neurosci (2025) (paper) 
  • Bender A, Zhao C, Vogel E, Awh E, Voytek B. Differential representations of spatial location by aperiodic and alpha oscillatory activity in working memory. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (2025) (paper)
  • Smith SE, Ma V, Gonzalez C, Chapman A, Printz D, Voytek B#, Soltani M#. Clinical EEG slowing induced by electroconvulsive therapy is better described by increased frontal aperiodic activity. Transl Psychiatry (2023) (paper) 
  • Voytek B. The data science future of neuroscience theory. Nature Methods (2022) (paper) 
  • Donoghue T, Schaworonkow N, Voytek B. Methodological considerations for studying neural oscillations. Eur J Neurosci (2021) (paper) 
  • Donoghue T*, Haller M*, Peterson EJ*, Varma P, Sebastian P, Gao R, Noto T, Knight RT, Shestyuk A#, Voytek B#. Parameterizing neural power spectra into periodic and aperiodic components. Nature Neurosci (2020) (paper) 
  • Gao R, van den Brink RL, Pfeffer T, Voytek B. Neuronal timescales are functionally dynamic and shaped by cortical microarchitecture. eLife (2020) (paper) 
  • Trujillo CA*, Gao R*, Negraes PD*, Chaim IA, Domissy A, Vandenberghe M, Devor A, Yeo GW, Voytek B#, Muotri AR#. Complex Oscillatory Waves Emerging from Cortical Organoids Model Early Human Brain Network Development. Cell Stem Cell. (2019) (paper) 
  • Gao R, Peterson EJ, Voytek B. Inferring synaptic excitation/inhibition balance from field potentials. NeuroImage (2017) (paper) 
  • Cole SR & Voytek B. Brain oscillations and the importance of waveform shape. Trends Cogn Sci (2017) (paper)