Matthias Nau

Cognitive neuroscientist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands



Welcome to my website

I am an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in collaboration with the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging. My research focuses on the links between spontaneous natural behaviors and brain activity during vision, imagery, and memory recall. My Work characterizes this link using neuroimaging (mostly fMRI) and eye tracking combined with naturalistic stimuli and virtual reality, focusing on multi-task studies to find principles that generalize across single experiments. In addition, I develop open access Resources to push the boundaries of how human behavior can be studied using neuroimaging and machine learning.

Education & Experience

Since 01/2024 - Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Section of Cognitive Psychology, Amsterdam, NL.

11/2020 - 12/2023 - Postdoctoral researcher
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Laboratory of Brain and Cognition (LBC), Bethesda, MD, USA. PI: Christopher I. Baker
Supported by a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation .

01/2020 - 10/2020 - Postdoctoral researcher
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Neural Computation, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. PI: Christian F. Doeller

09/2016 - 01/2020 - PhD Candidate
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Neural Computation, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. PI: Christian F. Doeller

04/2016 - 08/2016 - Research Assistant
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. PI: Christian F. Doeller

11/2014 - 03/2016 - Research Assistant
Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany. PI: Andreas Bartels

11/2014 - Master of Science
University of Tübingen, Neurobiology, Tübingen, Germany.


04/2019 - 04/2023 - Guest researcher
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

11/2014 - 03/2016 - Guest researcher
Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.