Jack Van Horn M.Eng, PhD

Jack Van Horn joins the faculty of the University of Virginia as Professor of Psychology with a joint appointment in the School of Data Science. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Eastern Washington University, a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his doctorate from the University of London in the United Kingdom. He conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health on the NIH main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, specializing in the human neuroimaging investigation of brain function. He has held previous faculty positions at Dartmouth College, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. He is an accomplished author (over 200 journal and book chapter publications; h-index>57), a university-level educator, and is known internationally as a pioneer in open science, an expert in neuroinformatics, and ‘big data analytics.

His research program is centered on the informatics and data science of human neuroimaging and accompanying biomedical data for the identification of patterns and biomarkers in brain health and disease. This work focuses on the multimodal neuroimaging of healthy subjects, those with brain trauma, age-related disease, and in children with autism spectrum disorder - contrasting patterns of neuroanatomy, the quantification of brain connectomics, brain function, and the role of computational approaches to dealing with large-scale neuroscience data. This includes using methodologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging to model the morphological effects of brain injury as well as the effect on white matter fiber pathways. His work involves the use of leading-edge data science and computational approaches for data synthesis, analysis, and inference. He has had work published in journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Science, PNAS, Neuroimage, and Philosophical Transactions. He has presented his research at numerous domestic and international scientific conferences and workshops. Dr. Van Horn has received grant funding from the NIH and NSF to support his work as well as has contributed to numerous multi-center collaborative efforts (e.g. The Human Connectome Project; Autism Centers of Excellence, Centers for Biomedical Computing, etc).

Dr. Van Horn served as the Operations Director of the fMRI Data Center – a pioneering effort to share raw, processed, and results in data from neuroimaging studies of human cognition. He was the principal investigator of the NIH BD2K Training Coordinating Center, an effort to synthesize data science educational content from around the Internet, index it into a common database framework, and make the information searchable, sortable, and openly available for users to organize into personalized training plans. As part of this program, a unique series of five-day mentored and facilitated Data Science Innovation Lab workshops were held for junior investigators on specific biomedical topics where data science-based approaches are well suited, e.g. mobile health devices, the study of the microbiome, the mathematics of single-cell dynamics, and rural health. This latter component continues at UVA in partnership with the HIV CTSA, the UVA Brain Institute, the UVA Department of Psychology, and the UVA School of Data Science.