Jingnan Du

Jingnan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Buckner lab, where he studies the functional organization of large-scale brain networks and their roles in higher-order cognition. His research focuses on the association cortex—regions of the brain that have undergone a disproportionate expansion during recent hominin evolution. By combining precision neuroimaging with novel computational approaches, he recently explored the detailed organization of individual brains and discovered a novel topographic feature of the association cortex: parallel networks arranged in side-by-side juxtapositions, repeating across multiple association zones. These repeated zones link to three “domain-specialized” networks supporting language, social inference, and spatial/episodic processing, as well as two “domain-general” frontoparietal networks underpinning cognitive control. In addition, he developed a new 15-network parcellation of the cerebral cortex, known as DU15NET, which is publicly available. Before joining the Buckner lab as a postdoc, Jingnan completed his PhD at Fudan University and spent the final two years of his PhD studies as a visiting student in Dr. Randy Buckner’s lab at Harvard University.