Welcome!

Hi! I’m Yongning Lei (he/him), and my friends call me Tiger. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) in San Sebastián, Spain, supervised by Dr. Garikoitz Lerma-Usabiaga and Dr. Pedro M. (Kepa) Paz-Alonso. I study the reading circuitry of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, using dense-sampling fMRI, retinotopy, diffusion MRI and quantitative MRI.

My primary research interests are the neural basis of reading, individual variability in brain organization, visual field mapping and reproducible neuroimaging.

To be specific, I ask questions like:
Where exactly are the reading-selective regions in each individual brain, and how can we delineate them reproducibly?
How do white-matter pathways connect the ventral occipitotemporal cortex to the frontal language network?
How do stimulus features, such as words versus checkerboards, shape population receptive field estimates?
How can we make neuroimaging pipelines transparent, automated and reproducible from scanner to result?

I received my M.Sc. in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language at BCBL and my B.Sc. in Neuroscience at New York University Shanghai. My Ph.D. is funded by a BFI Predoctoral Fellowship from the Basque Government.

I have rich hands-on experience with MRI across the whole pipeline, from sequence tuning to data acquisition and analysis. I also build my own software tools (these days, of course, with the help of AI).