Ariel Rokem is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Department of Psychology. He received a PhD in neuroscience from UC Berkeley (2010) and additional postdoctoral training in computational neuroimaging at Stanford (2011 – 2015). He was also previously a Senior Data Scientist at the University of Washington eScience Institute (2015-2020)
He leads a research program in neuroinformatics, the development of data science tools, techniques and methods and their application to the analysis of neural data. One thrust of this research focuses specifically on the application of methods from statistical learning to analysis of diffusion MRI data acquired in human brain. This type of data sheds light on the role that human brain connections play in cognitive abilities, in diverse behaviors, and in neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Another thrust of the research focuses specifically on the development of systems for analysis (e.g., Mehta et al. 2017, Richford and Rokem, 2018) and sharing (e.g. Yeatman et al. 2018) of large-scale open datasets, to enable research with datasets that are increasingly becoming available through data-sharing initiatives, and to facilitate its reproducibility.
He is a member of the Software and Data Carpentry communities, where he has been an instructor since 2013 and an instructor trainer 2015. He also directs the annual Summer Institute for Neuroimaging and Data Science (NeuroHackademy). A contributor to multiple open-source software projects in the scientific Python ecosystem, he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal for Open Source Software (JOSS).
Expertise:
- Python
- Git/GitHub
- Cloud computing
- Machine learning
- Neuroinformatics