Jingnan Du

Biography

Jingnan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also affiliated with the Human Neuroimaging Center. Before joining Notre Dame he was a postdoctoral researcher with Randy Buckner in the Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, and a visiting postdoctoral researcher with Ev Fedorenko in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics with Jianfeng Feng at the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, spending the final two years of his doctoral training as a visiting Ph.D. student in Randy Buckner's lab at Harvard.

His research investigates how large-scale functional networks are organized in the human brain and how they support higher-order cognitive functions, including language, remembering, social inference, and working memory. Most of what is known about this organization comes from averaging across people, which can blur the boundaries between networks that sit side-by-side in association cortex. Jingnan develops precision neuroimaging methods to map these networks within each individual's own neuroanatomy. Using this approach, he has shown that functionally specialized regions form distributed circuits spanning the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, striatum, and thalamus. He developed DU15NET, a precision atlas that delineates 15 cortical networks within individuals, and demonstrated that individualized networks can be reliably estimated from task-based functional connectivity as well as resting-state data. His recent work extends this framework to the human language system, where he identified an intermediate language network that is spatially interdigitated with the canonical language network yet functionally distinct from it. For more information, see his CV or follow him on Bluesky or X.