ME

Welcome!

Hello, I’m Tom! I’m a research scientist, working in the area of computational and cognitive neuroscience. Starting August, 2025 I will be a Lecturer of Cognitive Science at the University of Manchester! Until then, I am finishing my appointment as a postdoctoral research scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Joshua Jacobs at Columbia University. Before that, I did my PhD with Dr. Bradley Voytek, at the University of California, San Diego.

My research is focused on electrophysiological recordings in human subjects, including methods and applications for analyzing single-unit, periodic, and aperiodic electrophysiological neural activity and how it relates to neural computation, cognition, and disease. For a high-level overview, my research work has been covered in Quanta Magazine (reprinted by Wired), and is also described on the research page.

For the full scientific version, you can check out my list of publications, and/or my CV.

On this site you can find out a bit about me and my work, including:

Brief Profile

I grew up in Quebec, Canada, in a small town full of ski hills and colourful autumn leaves. At university, I studied Cognitive Science, a major I originally chose due to be able to explore multiple different areas, which led to and fostered my interest with how interdisciplinary approaches allow for investigating broad and interesting questions from multiple distinct perspectives. As I got more involved in research, I realized that a lot of the day-to-day work in psychology / neuroscience / cognitive science relies on developing and applying computational measures and analyses to often large and complex datasets. This started me down the path of furthering my understanding and skills in methods development, software, and computational analyses - all in the service of better investigating questions of interest in cognitive neuroscience.

In particular, I became interested in questions relating to how to best measure and interpret features of interest in neural data, especially with electrophysiology recordings of brain activity that can give us direct information on patterns of activity in the brain with high temporal precision. This led me to a research program focusing on trying to understand electrical signals in the brain - investigating how we can measure them, and what they might mean physiologically. In practice, this work often focuses on open-source tool development and other code contributions. Ultimately, this work is in service of improving and supporting empirical work, and my work is embedded into empirical data analysis through the examination of openly available datasets and through collaborations, covering topics including investigating functional neural organization, methods development for neuro-electrophysiological data, and investigating how patterns of electrical neural activity relate to cognition and disease.

Ultimately, to me one of the main joys of science is getting to work with lots of interesting people, with all of my work drawing directly or indirectly from collaboration across many wonderful mentors, research assistants, colleagues, collaborators, teaching assistants and code contributors. I also think it’s important to consider how we do science, developing and adopting approaches that are transparent and accessible (for example, using and releasing open data and developing openly accessible tools and resources), and making sure we engage in science in ways that are equitable and inclusive for all. If you are interested in the work that I do, and/or would be interested in collaborating, please do not necessitate to get in contact!

Contact

If you’d like to get in touch, you can e-mail me at tdonoghue.research@gmail.com.

You can also find me on Github or Bluesky.

Website Source

This website is hosted using Github pages, and the source repository is available here.

This page is usually fairly up to date. You can check the last updated date on website update log.