Ali Rahimpour Jounghani

I am a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, working in the C-Brain Lab, and Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Walnot Inc, where I am Principal Investigator of an NIH STTR award to develop a wearable fNIRS platform for precision psychiatry.

My research develops wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) platforms and computational methods for precision mental health. I combine multimodal neuroimaging (fNIRS, EEG, fMRI) with machine learning to characterize individual brain function, to guide neurofeedback-based cognitive interventions for children with ADHD, and to study clinical populations including PTSD, Prader–Willi syndrome, and Alzheimer’s disease. My current work builds self-supervised foundation models for optical neuroimaging to enable scalable brain-state discovery across tasks, populations, and real-world contexts.

Research interests

  • Wearable functional neuroimaging
  • Precision mental health & psychiatry
  • ADHD and neurodevelopmental conditions
  • Deep phenotyping
  • Multimodal analysis
  • Foundation models for neuroimaging
  • Clinical populations: PTSD, Prader–Willi syndrome, Alzheimer's disease

News

  • Aug 2026 Wrote “What happens to the brain after 15 minutes of scrolling?” for Behind the Paper, Springer Nature Research Communities, on our Scientific Reports study of social media use and executive function.
  • 2026 Walnot Inc joined the StartX Accelerator (Stanford-affiliated).
  • 2026 Walnot Inc named a Top Innovator Honoree at Venture Summit West 2026 (youngStartup Ventures).
  • 2026 Walnot Inc selected to pitch at Ferment 2026, Stanford Biotech Group.
  • May 2026 Three posters on at-home wearable fNIRS and deep phenotyping presented at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Retreat, Stanford.
  • 2026 Taught a workshop on MATLAB analysis of dense-sampled, longitudinal neuroimaging data, Division of Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences, Stanford Medicine.
  • Sep 2025 Outstanding Oral Presentation Award, UK fNIRS Conference, Cambridge, for fNIRS work on mathematics learning in South African children.

Selected publications

All publications →
  1. Naturalistic fNIRS assessment reveals decline in executive function and altered prefrontal activation following social media use in college students
    A. Aitken, A. Rahimpour Jounghani, L. M. Carbonell, D. Tadeo, A. Kumar, S. Crawford, A. K. Bowden, S. M. H. Hosseini
    Scientific Reports, 15(1), 36960 (2025)
    DOICo-first author
  2. fNIRS reproducibility varies with data quality, analysis pipelines, and researcher experience
    M. A. Yücel, R. Luke, R. C. Mesquita, …, A. Rahimpour Jounghani, …, V. Zemanek (109 authors)
    Communications Biology, 8(1), 1149 (2025)
    DOI
  3. Wearable fNIRS platform for dense sampling and precision functional neuroimaging
    A. Rahimpour Jounghani, A. Kumar, L. Moreno Carbonell, E. P. L. Aguilar, T. B. Picardi, S. Crawford, A. K. Bowden, S. M. H. Hosseini
    npj Digital Medicine, 8(1), 271 (2025)
    DOIFirst author
  4. Neuromonitoring-guided working memory intervention in children with ADHD
    A. Rahimpour Jounghani, E. Gozdas, L. Dacorro, B. Avelar-Pereira, S. Reitmaier, H. Fingerhut, D. S. Hong, G. Elliott, A. Y. Hardan, S. P. Hinshaw, S. H. Hosseini
    iScience, 27(11), 111087 (2024)
    DOIFirst author
  5. Investigating the role of auditory cues in modulating motor timing: insights from EEG and deep learning
    A. Rahimpour Jounghani, K. C. Backer, A. Vahid, D. C. Comstock, J. Zamani, H. Hosseini, R. Balasubramaniam, H. Bortfeld
    Cerebral Cortex, 34(10), bhae427 (2024)
    DOIFirst author
  6. Multiple levels of contextual influence on action-based timing behavior and cortical activation
    A. Rahimpour Jounghani, P. Lanka, L. Pollonini, S. Proksch, R. Balasubramaniam, H. Bortfeld
    Scientific Reports, 13(1), 7154 (2023)
    DOIFirst author