Runnan Cao, PhD
Assistant Professor of Radiology
Research Centers:
Neuroimaging Labs Research CenterLab:
Shuo Wang LabRunnan Cao, PhD, is an assistant professor of radiology in the Neuroimaging Labs Research Center at WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR). Cao is a cognitive computational neuroscientist investigating the neural mechanisms of visual and social cognition. She leads the Multimodal Cognitive Neuroscience (MCN) Lab to examine how the human brain encodes faces and objects, how visual perception supports memory and higher-level social judgments, and how these processes may differ in clinical conditions. The MCN Lab combines human single-neuron recordings, intracranial EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, behavioral experiments and computational modeling.
Cao earned her doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research is funded through NIH (K99/R00), Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and the McDonnell Center for System Neuroscience at Washington University.
Research Interests
Face and object perception, social cognition, autism, intracranial electrophysiology, human single-neuron recordings, fMRI, machine/deep learning
Link to Publications
Education History
Doctorate
Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Undergraduate
Shandong Normal University
Associations
Society for Neuroscience Vision Science
Society Social & Affective Neuroscience
Society Association for Women in Science Co-Chair, Outreach Women’s Group, WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology
Awards
2026–2028 BBRF Young Investigator Award
2025–2026 MIR Pilot Fund, WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology
2024–2029 BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 Award
2023–2026 FY24 Small Grants Program, The McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience
2024 Finalist, O’Leary competition, Washington University in St. Louis
2015 Excellent PhD Student, Chinese Academy of Sciences (top 10%)
2009–2011 First Degree Scholarship, Shandong Normal University (top 5%)