[2] Following graduation from medical school in 1987, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as adjunct assistant professor of intelligent systems while completing a postdoctoral residency in neurology.
[2] In 2017, Small left his position as Chair of Neurology to found and develop the university's Medical Innovation Institute as its Chief Scientific Officer.
[4] In spring 2019, Small was appointed dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas,[5][6] a position he held through the 2023 academic year.
Methods that he uses to investigate research questions include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion MRI, neural networks, machine learning, and human neurophysiology.
Small was a pioneer in using magnetic resonance imaging to understand how the brain gives rise to the complex phenomenon of thought, and has consistently been positioned at the forefront of the study of the neurobiology of language.
His collaborative research provides evidence for motor system contributions to basic mechanisms of face-to-face communication for the decoding of acoustic-phonetic information and gesture, which correspond to homuncular activation patterns on premotor cortex.
[12] Related work indicates that differential exogenous processing demands in discourse comprehension affect the nature of endogenous "resting state" networks dependent on the preceding task.