Prior to his appointment at Stanford in 2014, he held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin.

With Adam Aron, Poldrack published two papers that established the role of a circuit involving right prefrontal cortex and the subthalamic nucleus in the inhibition of motor responses.

[7][8] They subsequently showed that it was possible to predict individual differences in inhibitory behavior from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data using high-dimensional regression machines.

[9] In 2007, Poldrack and colleagues demonstrated that brain activity during decisions under risk exhibited the pattern of gain- and loss-responsiveness predicted by prospect theory.

His lab subsequently applied machine learning methods to fMRI data, demonstrating that it is possible to accurately infer mental states in a way that generalizes across individuals.

[23] This entire dataset was made openly available to the public for further analysis[24] Poldrack is a part of the Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) network.