Rate My Professor Yaroslav Halchenko

Yaroslav O. Halchenko serves as Research Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. He is also the Director of the Center for Open Neuroscience within the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department. Halchenko earned his B.S. in Optoelectronic Engineering from Vinnitsa State University in Ukraine, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His career at Dartmouth began with a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences from 2012 to 2013. He progressed through roles including Research Scientist from 2013 to 2015, Research Assistant Professor from 2016 to 2018, and Research Associate Professor starting in 2018, alongside adjunct positions in Computer Science.

Halchenko's research specializes in making neuroscience open, efficient, and reproducible, with expertise in neuroimaging, machine learning applied to neural data, software and data distributions, and data standards. He has founded and leads major open-source initiatives such as PyMVPA for multivariate pattern analysis of neural data, DataLad for joint management of code and data, NeuroDebian, DueCredit for crediting software usage, and the DANDI Archive under the BRAIN Initiative. He contributes to community standards like BIDS and NWB, serving on their steering and technical advisory boards. Notable publications co-authored by Halchenko include "TemplateFlow: FAIR-sharing of multi-scale, multi-species brain models" in Nature Methods in 2022, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network paper in Nature in 2021, "The OpenNeuro resource for sharing of neuroscience data" in eLife in 2021, and "DataLad: distributed system for joint management of code, data, and their relationship" in the Journal of Open Source Software in 2021. His service includes membership on the OHBM Technology Task Force, Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center Advisory Committee, and co-organization of Brainhack Global events at Dartmouth in 2017 and 2018. Earlier awards include first place in the ACM South-Eastern European Regional Programming Contest in 1994 and fellowships from the International Soros Science Educational Program.