CV

Education

2026–2030: Ph.D. in Cognition & Perception
- New York University
- Advisors: Noga Zaslavsky and Liina Pylkkänen
2020–2024: B.S. in Computer Science and Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience, with Honors
- University of Michigan

2024–2026: Research Technician
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- Advisor: Anna Ivanova

2026. Gao, R., Cheung, C., Siegelman, M., Pongos, A. L. A., Kean, H. H., Tanner, A., Fedorenko, E., & Ivanova, A. A.
The language network responds robustly to sentences across tasks.
Imaging Neuroscience.
2026. Krempel, R.*, Li, J.*, Gao, R.*, Yu, R., & Ivanova, A. A.
Variations in inner language and conceptual thought experience.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
2026. Schulman, D. S., Kerr, B., Kolachalama, S., Yin, S., Pienkney, J., Wachsman, M., Jalgaonkar, N., Gao, R., Jones, M. L. H., & Awtar, S.
Physiological data-driven models for motion sickness prediction.
Applied Ergonomics.
2025. Gao, R., Miller, C. S., Lin, B. T. W., Schwarz, C. W., & Jones, M. L. H.
Signal quality assessment and reconstruction of PPG-derived signals for heart rate and variability estimation in in-vehicle applications: A comparative review and empirical validation.
Sensors.
2025. Binhuraib, T., Gao, R., & Ivanova, A. A.
LITcoder: A general-purpose library for building and comparing encoding models.
NeurIPS Workshop on Data on the Brain and Mind.
2025. Zhao, J., Gao, R., & Brennan, J. R.
Decoding the neural dynamics of headed syntactic structure building.
Journal of Neuroscience.

* Equal contribution.

2026. Gao, R., & Ivanova, A. A.
Scaling laws for group-constrained, subject-specific task fMRI analyses.
2025. Ivanova, A. A., Kauf, C., Gao, R., She, J. S., Kean, H. H., Goldhaber, T., Nieto-Castañón, A., Varley, R., Kanwisher, N., & Fedorenko, E.
Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network.

2026. Gao, R.*, Li, J.*, Krempel, R.*, Yu, R., & Ivanova, A. A.
Forms of Inner Thinking (FIT): A prompt-based questionnaire reveals individual differences in inner language.
Poster presented at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing.
2025. Gao, R., & Ivanova, A. A.
Scaling laws in functional region of interest (fROI) analyses.
Poster presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting.

* Equal contribution.

2026: Engberg Fellowship ($1,000)
- Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University
2026–2030: Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship
- Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University