About
I’m an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where I lead the Shared Minds Lab. Previously, I worked as a research scholar with Uri Hasson and Ken Norman at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. I completed my PhD with Jim Haxby at Dartmouth College.
The core questions driving my research are “What is shared between individual brains?” and “How do we share our thoughts with one another?”—using language and other coordinated actions. My research combines naturalistic neuroimaging paradigms (fMRI, ECoG) and deep neural networks to better answer these questions in real-world contexts. In current work, we’re leveraging large language models to better understand how humans use language to transmit complex thoughts from one brain to another.
I’ll be recruiting PhD students at USC this year to start in Fall 2027!
Recent work
For an overview of some of our recent work, check out this perspective piece recently published in Neuron:
Nastase, S. A., Zada, Z., Goldberg, A., & Hasson, U. (2026). Unifying the structures of language in a neural population code. Neuron.
DOI