News
2026 · 08 — New preprint: Multiple nested distributed language networks in the human brain
How many networks support human language? Across three independent cohorts (22 individuals, 216 MRI sessions), we dissociate two nested left-lateralized perisylvian networks: an intermediate network (intLANG) anchored to precentral speech areas and the Sylvian parietal-temporal area, and a surrounding association network (aLANG) extending into higher-order prefrontal and temporal cortex. The two are functionally distinct — intLANG is recruited by phonological demands, aLANG by meaning-based sentence processing — and both are fully recapitulated from adjacent cerebellar regions, suggesting that they are segregated brain-wide networks.
2026 · 07 — Qingyi Li joins the lab as a visiting PhD student from Verginia Tech, Department of Psychology. She will help Jingnan transfer the iProc neuroimaging processing pipeline to CRC at Notre Dame and investigate how higher-orders cognitive brain networks are organized within subcortical structures. She also plans to apply precision functional mapping to her work in developmental populations at VT.
2026 · 07 — Charles Sander joins the lab as a senior thesis student through the Glynn Family Honors Program. His thesis applies precision functional mapping to refine maps of the motor cortex and to model networks impaired in psychiatric disease.
2026 · 07 — New paper in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging: Increased aperiodic exponents track depressive symptom severity in refractory epilepsy.
2026 · 07 — The lab opens at Notre Dame. Jingnan joins the Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in the Cognition, Brain, and Behavior area.
2026 · 06 — New paper in Neuron: Objective quality assessment for precision functional MRI data.
2026 · 06 — New preprint: Precision functional parcellation of the human cortex via rest-task fMRI fusion.
2026 · 05 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Revisiting Human Association Networks Using Precision Functional Mapping,” in Daniel Schacter’s lab in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
2026 · 04 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals,” OpenTalks #101, hosted by the OpenScience Community (virtual).
2026 · 03 — Jingnan co-chaired and spoke at the selected symposium Not Your Average Brain: Individual-Level fMRI as a Paradigm Shift for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting in Vancouver. Co-chaired with Andre Zamani (University of British Columbia); the other speakers were Charles Lynch, Rodrigo Braga, and Arielle Keller.
2026 · 02 — Jingnan visited Russell Poldrack’s lab in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, and gave the talk “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals.”
2026 · 02 — New paper in Nature Communications: Precision estimates of longitudinal brain aging capture unexpected individual differences in one year.
2026 · 01 — Jingnan gave “Precision Neuroimaging of the Brain” in the opening session, State of the Art: Brain Imaging, of the MIT Medical Imaging Initiative Symposium at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The session was moderated by John Gabrieli, with talks by Rebecca Saxe, Renzo Huber, and Kwanghun Chung.
2026 · 01 — New preprint: Age-associated structural decline is linked to arterial flow territories in the brain.
2025 · 12 — New paper in Neuron: Within-individual precision mapping of brain networks exclusively using task data.
We show that networks can be estimated within individuals from task fMRI data alone, and that the resulting parcellations converge on those derived from rest. This opens precision functional mapping to the large archives of task fMRI already collected, and to populations for whom extended fixation scans are impractical.
2025 · 11 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals,” in the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame.
2025 · 11 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals,” in Alex Fornito’s Neural Systems and Behaviour Lab at Monash University (virtual).
2025 · 11 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals,” in Ev Fedorenko’s Language Lab at MIT.
2025 · 11 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals,” in the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Peking University (virtual).
2025 · 10 — Press: Harvard Gazette, "New way to map the unique brain organization of individuals".
2025 · 10 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Mapping Precision Functional Networks in an Individual’s Brain,” in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University (virtual).
2025 · 10 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Mapping Precision Functional Networks in an Individual’s Brain,” at the University of Delaware Cognitive Area Seminar (virtual).
2025 · 10 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of Human Large-Scale Brain Networks Estimated Within Individuals,” in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
2025 · 10 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Mapping Precision Functional Networks in an Individual’s Brain,” at the South China Normal University Multimodal Mind Seminar (virtual).
2025 · 10 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Organization of the Human Cerebral Cortex Estimated Within Individuals,” at the Harvard CBS Neurolunch Seminar.
2025 · 07 — New paper in J Neurophysiol: Ventral striatum is preferentially correlated with the salience network.
2025 · 03 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Within-individual Precision Mapping of Brain Networks,” at the Chinese Institute for Brain Research (virtual).
2024 · 11 — New paper in Science Advances: Within-individual organization of the human cognitive cerebellum.
2024 · 11 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Within-Individual Organization of the Human Cerebral Cortex: Networks, Global Topography, and Function,” in Cory Shain’s lab in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University (virtual).
2024 · 10 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Estimating Precision Brain Networks Using Task Data: Correspondence to Passive Fixation, Predictive Validity, and New Opportunities,” in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
2024 · 08 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Within-Individual Organization of the Human Cerebral Cortex: Networks, Global Topography, and Function,” at the IDG McGovern Institute / Psychology, Beijing Normal University (virtual).
2024 · 07 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Within-Individual Organization of the Human Cerebral Cortex: Networks, Global Topography, and Function,” at ISTBI, Fudan University (virtual).
2025 · 02 — Jingnan gave a talk titled “Within-Individual Organization of the Human Cerebral Cortex: Networks, Global Topography, and Function,” at the Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital.
2024 · 03 — New paper in J Neurophysiol: Organization of the human cerebral cortex estimated within individuals; the DU15NET atlas was released alongside it, together with within-individual network estimates and task contrast maps on BALSA and the precision network mapping pipeline.
Papers, preprints, talks, press, from 2024 onward. Earlier work is listed in full on the Publications page and in Jingnan’s CV.