Ian Charest

Timeline

1. 2010

   A Glasgow PhD on voices

   He completes a PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2010 with the thesis "Hierarchical organisation of voice and voice gender perception". In an electroencephalography experiment, he finds an early brain response to voices around 164 ms, which he names the "fronto-temporal positivity to voice".

2. 2014

   Unique object representations in the brain

   In 2014, he publishes a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, with Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and other coauthors. The fMRI study finds that brain activity patterns for object images are unique to each person in early visual cortex and human inferior temporal cortex, and that the inferior temporal pattern predicts that person's similarity judgments.

3. September 2015

   Lecturer at Birmingham

   In September 2015, he becomes a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. He arrives from a career development fellowship at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, where his neuroimaging work explores individual differences in brain representations of objects.

4. 2022

   The Natural Scenes Dataset

   In 2022, Nature Neuroscience publishes the Natural Scenes Dataset paper, which he coauthors with Emily J. Allen, Kendrick Kay, Thomas Naselaris and others. The dataset holds high-resolution fMRI responses to tens of thousands of natural scenes, and deep neural network models trained on it predict brain activity more accurately than state-of-the-art computer vision models.

5. March 2024

   Decoding face recognition ability

   In March 2024, PNAS Nexus publishes "Decoding face recognition abilities in the human brain", written with Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand and other colleagues, with him as final author. The team decodes face recognition ability from one second of high-density EEG activity with up to 80% accuracy and compares participants' brain representations with artificial neural network models of vision and semantics. The work is supported by his ERC Starting Grant.

6. August 2025

   Brain and language models align

   In August 2025, Nature Machine Intelligence publishes "High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models", which follows a 2022 arXiv preprint. Adrien Doerig and Tim C. Kietzmann share first authorship, and he and Kendrick Kay jointly supervise the work. Large language model embeddings of scene captions characterize brain activity evoked by natural scenes, and networks trained to map images onto those embeddings align with brain representations better than many state-of-the-art alternatives.

7. As of October 2026

   A Montréal lab and Courtois chair

   He is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal and an associate academic member of Mila. He leads the Charest Lab, which studies visual recognition in the brain with M-EEG and fMRI and applies deep learning and machine learning, and he holds a Courtois chair in cognitive and computational neuroscience.