Following an engineering degree and a master in Biomathematics, Dr Poline received his PhD in 1993 in the field of medical imaging analyis. Since 1990, Dr Poline has worked on the development of methods for the analysis of functional imaging data. While a post-doctoral fellow in London (1994-1996), he co-authored SPM, a popular fMRI statistical analysis software, and developed novel data analysis techniques.

In the years 2000, Dr Poline activities turned into neuroinformatics as a fundamental part of neuroimaging, and he chairs the neuroimaging data sharing task force of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility. He co-founded Frontiers in Brain Imaging Methods for five years in 2012 partly to address the need for reproducibility and the development of methods in the brain imaging field. He joined the University of California Berkeley in 2012, developing methods for resting-state fMRI and imaging genetic data using clustering techniques, teaching neuroimaging data analysis in Python, and working to better understand and propose solutions to the neuroimaging reproducibility issues.

Dr Poline joined the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University as an associate professor in 2017 to work on neuroinformatics, open science and brain imaging or imaging genetic methods. He is currently the co-chair of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform Technical Steering committee and the co-lead of NeuroHub, the neuroinformatics infrastructure of the Mcgill Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives initiative, and the co-director for the Brain Imaging Centre Neuroinformatics. In 2020, he was elected chair of the Council for Training, Science and Infrastructure of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility.