Alejandro De La Vega - Research Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin

Alejandro De La Vega

Research Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin

Austin, Texas, United States

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

👤

Senior

🎓

Top School

Alejandro De La Vega is a Research Assistant Professor and research data scientist with 13 years of experience building robust, production-ready tools that accelerate discovery from human neuroimaging data. He leads engineering and scientific efforts to design cloud-based, containerized pipelines and RESTful APIs for large-scale meta-analyses, having aggregated and analyzed over 14,000 fMRI studies and deployed workflows to supercomputing environments. A consistent open-source contributor, Alejandro has strengthened flagship neuroimaging projects like neurosynth, nipype, and fMRIPrep by improving classification tools, BIDS data interfaces, and Dockerized deployment robustness. He combines rigorous cognitive neuroscience training (PhD) with hands-on DevOps and backend engineering, bridging reproducible research and scalable software. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic solutions that surface reliable statistical insights from messy, real-world datasets.

12 years of coding experience

5 years of employment as a software developer

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Cognitive Neuroscience, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Cognitive Neuroscience at University of Colorado at Boulder

Bachelor’s Degree, Linguistics and Cognitive Science (Computer Science track), Bachelor’s Degree, Linguistics and Cognitive Science (Computer Science track) at Pomona College

English, Spanish

Github Skills (26)

dataflow-programming10

preprocessing10

dataflow10

python10

image-processing10

preprocess10

feature-selection10

data-science10

scikit10

prepros10

machine-learning10

workflow-engine10

bids10

neuroimaging10

cross-validation10

Programming languages (12)

TypeScriptSingularityShellC++MakefileTeXJavaScriptGo

Github contributions (5)

neurosynth/neurosynth

Jun 2013 - Mar 2021

Neurosynth core tools

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Data Scientist

Contributions:92 commits, 6 PRs, 28 pushes in 7 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Alejandro primarily contributed to the `neurosynth` repository by implementing and modifying classification and decoding tools. They developed and refined the `Classifier` class, adding functionalities such as feature selection, cross-validation, and support for different classification methods like Extremely Randomized Forests (ERF). The user also added the ability to specify a scoring function, and integrated a manual cross-validation, which incorporated feature selection. These changes focused on providing users with more control and flexibility over classification tasks.

neurosciencepythonsciencecomputational-neuroscienceneurons

nipy/nipype

Sep 2017 - Sep 2021

Workflows and interfaces for neuroimaging packages

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:45 commits, 4 PRs, 61 comments in 4 years 1 month

Contributions summary:Alejandro's contributions centered around enhancing the `nipype` library, specifically by developing and integrating interfaces for BIDS data handling. They implemented the `BIDSDataGrabber` interface, allowing for querying and retrieval of BIDS datasets. The user also focused on ensuring the robustness of the interface, incorporating error handling, adding default functionalities, and updating dependencies.

workflowneuroimagingpythondata-scienceworkflow-engine

Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.

Request Free Trial