Biosketches
Janne Adolf is a pre-doctoral fellow in the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at the Psychological Methods department of the Institute of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and a stipend holder from the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course. She previously studied Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Amsterdam. In her dissertation, supervised by Manuel Völkle, Annette Brose and Florian Schmiedek, she investigates the application of formal models to intense longitudinal data on daily emotion experiences and behaviours, with an emphasis on dynamic models that incorporate changing contextual conditions. Conceptually, she is interested in how emotional functioning is construed, and how it is related to notions of adaptation and resilience. Broader interests concern methodological strategies and theoretical principles that integrate intra- and inter-individual psychological findings.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: adolf@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Dominik R. Bach is Professor for Clinical Psychiatry Research at the University of Zurich. He is an MD and psychiatry specialist, and obtained an MSc and PhD in experimental psychology, followed by a BSc in maths. For his postdoctoral fellowship, he joined the group of Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (University College London) where he trained in fMRI, MEG and mathematical methods. His group's current research interest is the computational and comparative neuroscience of emotion, and its application to psychiatric disorder.
Contact:
Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich
Universität Zürich
Lenggstrasse 31
8032 Zürich
Switzerland
E-mail: dominik.bach@uzh.ch
Andreas Brandmaier obtained his PhD in computer science in 2012. Currently, he is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, head of the Formal Methods in Lifespan Psychology project and fellow of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. In 2015, Andreas Brandmaier won the Heinz-Billing-Award for outstanding contributions to Computational Science. Andreas promotes conceptual and methodological innovation within developmental psychology and in interdisciplinary context. Particularly, he develops methods and computational tools to answer methodological challenges of lifespan psychology. His primary research interests are interindividual differences in behavioural and neural development, brainbehaviour relations across the lifespan, and the adaption of data mining and machine learning approaches to psychological research. As a novel method for analysing large data sets, he proposed Structural Equation Model Trees and Forests suitable for hypothesis-constraint exploration. Andreas is co-author of several scientific software packages, including Ωnyx, LIFESPAN, pdc and semtree.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: brandmaier@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Rasmus Bruckner’s main area of interest is cognitive and computational neuroscience, in which he focusses on learning and decision making across the lifespan. He uses a combination of behavioural experiments, computational modelling, and neurophysiological measures to learn more about the mechanisms that underlie age-related changes in decision making based on previous experience. He works primarily with Hauke Heekeren (FU Berlin) and Ben Eppinger (until recently TU Dresden) but also collaborates with Matt Nassar (Brown University) and Doug Garrett (MPIB). Before joining the IMPRS LIFE programme at the MPI for Human Development, he received his master’s degree in Psychology from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and his bachelor’s from Radboud University Nijmegen.
Contact:
Freie Universität Berlin
Department of Education and Psychology
Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: rasmusb@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Benjamin Chew is a first-year PhD student at University College London, affiliated with the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing. In 2014, he completed a Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. His research interests revolve around the neural mechanisms underlying decision-making and motivational states, with additional focus on how sources of internal uncertainties such as affect and agency contribute towards decision making. He hopes to draw upon theoretical frameworks from psychology and economics to understand these mechanisms as well as develop computational models to describe the relationship between overt behaviour and neural processes.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10 - 12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: benjamin.chew.13@ucl.ac.uk
Nathaniel Daw is Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Psychology, Princeton University. He received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, before conducting postdoctoral research at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. His research concerns computational approaches to reinforcement learning and decision making, and particularly the application of computational models in the laboratory, to the design of experiments and the analysis of behavioural and neural data. He is the recipient of a McKnight Scholar Award, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, a Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition from the MacDonnell Foundation, and the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics.
Contact:
Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
USA
E-mail: ndaw@princeton.edu
Peter Dayan is Professor and Director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge followed by a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in associative memory and reinforcement learning. He completed Postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute and the University of Toronto, then became an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to UCL. He builds mathematical and computational models of neural processing, with a particular emphasis on representation and learning.
Contact:
University College London
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit
Alexandra House
Room 407
17 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3AR
United Kingdom
E-mail: dayan@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk
Raymond J. Dolan is Mary Kinross Professor of Neuropsychiatry at University College London and Director of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research at UCL. His research is concerned with a neurobiological characterisation of human emotion and decision making. He holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), an Honorary Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and an External Member of the Max Planck Society.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10 - 12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: r.dolan@ucl.ac.uk
Charles Driver studied psychological science at the University of Queensland in Australia, where a wonderful professor fascinated him with the things one could learn about people and society using a few numbers. A short stint in the methods department at the University of Amsterdam deepened his interest in thinking about what and how one can learn from data. This led to his current directions, in which he works with Professor Manuel Völkle, developing and applying continuous time dynamic modelling approaches to developmental questions. In this regard, he is particularly interested in individual differences in patterns of change, in the context of a population - so within and between subject questions. For these purposes he has developed the R package ctsem, allowing analysis of both mixed effects, or fully hierarchical, dynamic models. He is very supportive of the open science movement, and is interested in general to work to improve the quality of inference in the social sciences.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: driver@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Ben Eppinger completed his PhD at the Universität des Saarlandes, Germany in 2008 and from then moved to Princeton University for postdoctoral training. After three years in Princeton, he moved to Berlin for a research scientist position at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. From Berlin he moved to the Technische Universität Dresden to take up an assistant professorship in life-span developmental neuroscience. Since August 2016 he is an associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal. Research interests: Ben Eppinger is interested in how learning and decisionmaking abilities develop over the lifespan. His current research programme involves three major parts: Lifespan age differences in habitual and goal-directed learning; adaptive age differences in learning in dynamically changing environments and developmental differences in social learning and decision making (learning from observation and advice). To study these research questions he uses experimental approaches in combination with computational and neuroscience methods (EEG and fMRI).
Contact:
Concordia University - Loyola Campus
7141 Sherbrooke Street West
Montréal, Québec, H4B 1R6
Canada
E-mail: ben.eppinger@concordia.ca
Douglas D. Garrett (PhD, 2011) is leader of the Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG) within the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and is based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Research within the LNDG examines how and why the human brain fluctuates so markedly from moment to moment. Perhaps counterintuitively, we continue to find that healthy, better functioning brains are characterized by greater signal variability across broad brain regions, cognitive domains, and task types. We examine brain signal variability and dynamics in relation to six core research foci: lifespan development, cognition, neuromodulation, structural/functional connectivity, transcranial stimulation, and modeling/methods. Accordingly, we have an inherent multivariate focus that allows the examination of brain signal variability phenomena across multiple levels of analysis.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: garrett@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Web: www.douglasdgarrett.com
Dorothea Hämmerer’s first encounter with neurophysiological indicators of cognitive control and decision making was while writing her diploma thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig with Markus Ullsperger. While working towards her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, she then started to pursue this topic from a developmental perspective under the supervision of Shu-Chen Li and Ulman Lindenberger. In the following years, she used a variety of neurophysiological methods (e.g. genomic imaging assessing dopaminergic candidate genes, oscillatory EEG analyses) to better understand why different age groups experience specific challenges in attentional and cognitive control during response conflicts and decision making. This work was done together with Shu-Chen Li at the MPI for Human Development in Berlin and the Technische Universität Dresden. In her current research, she is interested in age differences in attentional control attributed to differences in noradrenergic modulation during decision making. To investigate this, she uses pupillometric measures as well as midbrain imaging. This work is done together with Emrah Düzel and Ray Dolan at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL in London.
Contact:
University College London
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
17 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3AZ
United Kingdom
E-mail: d.hammerer@ucl.ac.uk
Tobias Hauser is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London. He is interested in the neurocomputational processes during learning and decision making, and how these go awry in psychiatric disorders. During his PhD at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department, University of Zurich, he studied the neural mechanisms causing stochastic and exploratory behaviours in patients with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Tobias currently investigates cautious decision making in the compulsivity spectrum. He uses computational process models of cognition in combination with neuroimaging methods to understand why compulsive people (high scoring healthy subjects and patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder) are indecisive and exhibit an increased information gathering behaviour.
Contact:
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
Institute of Neurology
University College London
12 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: t.hauser@ucl.ac.uk
Julian D. Karch is a PhD candidate in the Formal Methods in Lifespan Psychology project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He holds a Diploma (equivalent to a Master degree) in Computer Science from the Freie Universität Berlin. His main research interest is in adapting machine learning methods for use in psychological research. Specifically, in his most recent work, he has adapted the flexible approach of Gaussian process regression to the analysis of panel data. This modelling approach encompasses most classical panel analysis methods, such as SEM, as special cases. However, it extends SEM by allowing for a natural description of continuous time models, modelling of complex, nonlinear changes, and the specification of complex residual structures.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: karch@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Rogier Andrew Kievit studied quantitative psychology at the University of Amsterdam, receiving his PhD in 2014 with Denny Borsboom. He then moved on to a postdoctoral position with Rik Henson at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Science Unit (MRC-CBSU), working on the Cam-CAN study. Currently, Rogier is a Sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellow at the Cognition and Brain Sciences unit in Cambridge, collaborating closely with UCL (Ray Dolan), the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Ulman Lindenberger), the University of Cambridge (Ian Goodyer), and the MRC-CBSU (Rik Henson). His work concerns the neurobiological processes underlying developmental changes in executive functions across the lifespan. Specifically, he uses a variety of structural equation models, including MIMIC models, hierarchical factor models and longitudinal analysis to relate changes in cognitive abilities to changes in brain structure and function in large longitudinal datasets, with a particular interest in adolescence and old age. With the goal of understanding adolescent development and increasing neurocognitive health in older populations, Kievit’s particular interests are in models that effectively capture how cognitive changes across lifetime relate to brain reorganization, maintenance, and compensation.
Contact:
MRC-Cognition and Brain Science Unit
University of Cambridge
15 Chaucer Road
Cambridge, CB2 7EF
United Kingdom
E-mail: Rogier.Kievit@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Niels Kloosterman is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Douglas Garrett's Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, located at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. Niels is interested in the brain mechanisms and processes that transform subjective perceptual experiences into purposeful actions – perceptual decision making, in short. In particular, he likes to study how these mechanisms change with age and how the state of arousal affects decisions – for example, how decision making in drowsy and alert brains differs from each other. He uses visual and auditory perceptual tasks to study these topics, often combined with eye tracking and pupil size measurements as well as neuroimaging methods such as electro- or magneto-encephalography (E/MEG), or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In his current work, Niels combines eye tracking and fMRI to investigate how people view pictures of everyday scenes and how their viewing style is reflected in the dynamics of their brain activity. In another line of research he uses psychopharmacology and MEG to study how the arousal-related noradrenaline and dopamine brain systems affect the way in which we make basic perceptual decisions. Finally, in another study he investigates if the variability of neural signals measured with EEG could reflect a decision-maker’s subjective certainty about the occurrence of hardly visible perceptual events.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: kloosterman@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Julian Kosciessa is in his final-year as a Master’s student in the Mind and Brain programme at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and is about to join the International Max Planck Research School on Computational Methods in Psychiatry and Ageing Research (IMPRS COMP2PSYCH) programme as a doctoral student in October 2016. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology in 2014 from the Freie Universität Berlin, and during his undergraduate studies spent time abroad at the National University of Singapore and at University College London. He previously worked as a student assistant at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development in the ConMem (Cognitive and Neuronal Dynamics of Memory Across the Lifespan) group headed by Dr. Markus Werkle-Bergner and Dr. Yee Lee Shing/Dr. Myriam Sander and interned in Dr. Michael Chee’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in Singapore, with Dr. Wouter van den Bos (MPI) as well as with Dr. Dorothea Hämmerer (UCL). During this period, he contributed to projects involving microsaccade and oscillation detection from the EEG as well as structural and quantitative MRI analyses. Within the COMP2PSYCH programme, he will join Dr. Douglas D. Garrett’s lab at the MPI in Berlin to investigate agerelated signal variability in different neuroimaging modalities.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: kosciessa@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Zebulun Kurth-Nelson is a Senior Research Associate at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research in London. He is interested in the fast dynamics of the neural representations that underlie sophisticated decision making, how these representations evolve with experience, and how these processes fail in psychiatric disorders. Zeb received his BS in computer science from Iowa State University and his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Minnesota.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10 - 12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: z.kurth-nelson@ucl.ac.uk
Ulman Lindenberger is Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and Director of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research in Berlin. His primary research interests are behavioural and neural plasticity across the lifespan, brain-behaviour relations across the lifespan, multivariate developmental methodology, and formal models of behavioural change. He studied psychology and biology at Berkeley and Berlin, and received his doctorate in psychology from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1990. He holds honorary professorships at Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2010.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: seklindenberger@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Shuyan Liu is a third-year PhD student in Medical Neuroscience at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. She has broad interests and diverse educational backgrounds. Shuyan received her Bachelor of Engineering in environmental engineering from Kunming University of Science and Technology, China, and Master of Science in fishery science and aquaculture from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She attended Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany as an exchange student who participated in “Principles of Sustainable Business” in 2010 prior to beginning her Master programme in Berlin. Her current research focuses on how different break activities in everyday life, such as listening to music and playing video games, affect our learning processes.
Contact:
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Campus Charité Mitte
Charitéplatz 1
10117 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: shuyan.liu@charite.de
Yunzhe Liu is an upcoming PhD student on Ray Dolan's team at University College London, starting in September 2016. His research interests involve the development of mechanic understanding of emotion influence in learning and decision making, discovery of neural representational architecture of memory system in relation to goal-related behaviours, and identification of aberrant neural pathways that contribute to psychiatric disorders at both algorithmic and implementation levels. To achieve that, he uses a variety of neuroscientific techniques in combination with computational modelling. His long-term career goal is to become a computational and cognitive neuroscientist with a major focus on emotion and decision making and their aberrant interactions in psychiatric disorders. He hopes to utilize empirical and theoretical findings to help solve public mental health issues and promote treatments for mental disorders and well-being.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10 - 12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: liuyunzhe2012@gmail.com
Kevin Lloyd is a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL. His current research interest centres on the role of the dopamine system in shaping adaptive behaviour.
Contact:
University College London
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre
25 Howland Street
London, W1T 4JG
United Kingdom
E-mail: klloyd@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk
Liam Mason is a clinical psychologist with an interest in understanding the psychological mechanisms by which mood interfaces with decision making in psychiatric disorders. He also has an interest in understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of psychological therapies to hopefully improve future interventions. Both of these research streams incorporate neuroimaging methods, primarily EEG and fMRI and their fusion. He completed his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2012 and went on to undertake a further doctorate in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, completing in 2015. Since then he has worked in a specialist clinic delivering psychological interventions for psychosis, where he is the lead clinician for the bipolar disorder pathway.
Contact:
Clinical Psychologist and bipolar lead
PICUP Clinic, National & Specialist Service
South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
PO79, Maudsley Psychology Centre
Maudsley Hospital
Denmark Hill
London, SE5 8AZ
United Kingdom
Visiting Researcher
School of Psychology
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
King's College London
16 De Crespigny Park
London, SE5 8AF
United Kingdom
E-mail: liam.mason@kcl.ac.uk
Christoph Mathys studied physics at ETH Zurich, then ventured into the IT industry for several years, where he worked for a mobile applications company that he partly owned. After the sale of this company he returned to academia, where he completed a master's degree in psychology at the University of Zurich while doing experimental tDCS work at Harvard Medical School. He then returned to ETH Zurich to do his PhD with Klaas Enno Stephan, during which he also completed a four-year postgraduate training programme in psychoanalysis. He developed the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter (HGF), a generic hierarchical Bayesian model of inference in volatile environments and continues to develop and maintain the HGF Toolbox, a Matlab-based software package for the analysis of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments. His focus is on the hierarchical message passing that supports inference in the brain, and on failures in this kind of predictive coding in relation to psychopathology.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10-12 Russell Square
Maudsley Hospital
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: c.mathys@ucl.ac.uk
Rani Moran earned his BSc (1995-1998) and MSc (1998-2001) in Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After completing his MSc, he worked in industry, including areas such as communication systems, algorithmic financial trading, and solar energy. During these years, Rani patented several inventions (e.g., efficient solar reflectors) and developed a keen interest in Psychology. He earned a BA in Psychology from the Open University of Israel in 2009 and later decided (much to the chagrin of his friends, colleagues and accountant!) to embark on a PhD in Cognitive Psychology (2011-2015) at Tel-Aviv University. In his PhD research, Rani used his expertise in mathematics and statistical inference to push forward our understanding of control processes in human decision making and episodic memory. After finishing his PhD, Rani joined the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research in UCL as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Rani's work has been published in both specialist (e.g., Psychological Review) and multidisciplinary (e.g., PNAS and Current Biology) journals. When he is not thinking about science, he'd probably say that he's reflecting on Literature, Music and Art – but don't be fooled, he is actually thinking about food and wine.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10 - 12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: rani.moran@gmail.com
Janaina Mourao-Miranda, after finishing her BSc degree in Electronic Engineering in 1996 at Federal University of Para (Brazil), obtained an MSc in Computer Science in 1998 and a PhD in Neuroscience in 2002, both at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). As a postdoctoral researcher, she worked at the Department of Neural Computation at Siemens (Germany) and at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. In 2009, she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Researcher Career Development Fellowship (RCDF) to develop and apply pattern recognition approaches to analyze psychiatric neuroimaging data at the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, University College London. The experience she has gained during the RCDF has led her to extend her research to investigate complex relationships between neuroimaging data and multidimensional descriptions of mental health disorders and successfully apply for a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2013.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10-12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: J.Mourao-Miranda@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Michael Moutoussis is interested in computational models of psychiatric disorders. Are the sufferings and satisfactions of an unwell brain the phenomenal correlates of inappropriate computations? Focusing this question well greatly benefits from clinical experience. Clinical relevance is thus paramount. Within the very promising field of computational psychiatry it is crucial to delineate with greater certainty which domains of normative information processing 'give way' in psychiatric disorders and which are only peripherally involved. His clinical interests such as psychosis and personality disorder have inspired him to study how people see each other's minds. Together with colleagues from the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network he has made some important inroads as to the nature of choice variability and taste uncertainty. Such uncertainty affects how observing others‘ behaviour may shift one‘s own tastes – not just choices! He also works on other important aspects of the relation between basic value- based information processing and high-level psychiatric symptoms, especially self- and other- evaluation.
In terms of biography, he was born and raised in Athens, Greece. He studied physics – his first love. He then studied medicine, physiology and psychiatric research methodology while carrying out early mathematical modelling relevant to psychiatry. He earned specialist medical registration as a psychiatrist in psychotherapy. In his PhD he carried out experimental (clinical-psychological) and computational (temporal-difference and ideal bayesian observer) studies of paranoid delusions. His wife is a classical musician and they have two adult children.
Contact:
Clinical Lecturer in Neuroscience and
Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: m.moutoussis@ucl.ac.uk
Thorsten Pachur is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He studied psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Sussex and received his PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2006; from 2006-2012 he worked as a research scientist at the University of Basel, where he received his habilitation in 2012. Thorsten is interested in cognitive processes in decision making, including both internal and external search processes. His current projects focus on the mechanisms of attention allocation in decision making under risk and uncertainty and how these mechanisms change across the life span. Further, he studies the influence of learning processes on strategy selection in categorization and multiple-cue judgment. These issues are investigated using computational modelling, process tracing, and neuroimaging.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Adaptive Rationality
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: pachur@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Timothy J. Pleskac is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He is interested in how and why people make the decisions they do. His aim is to (a) understand how people – with their abilities and limitations – make judgments and decisions; (b) determine how differences in decision processes are associated with unsafe and unhealthy behaviours like substance use; and (c) investigate how decision processes shape micro- and macro-level phenomena. His current work focuses on understanding how people exploit the ecological relationship between risks and rewards to make decisions under uncertainty; mapping the dynamics of people's confidence; developing and testing quantum models of decision making; characterizing how people use rapid samples of information to make decisions; and investigating how evolutionary processes shape decision processes.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Adaptive Rationality
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: pleskac@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Robb Rutledge is a Senior Research Associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London in the group of Ray Dolan, and is a member of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. His research uses pharmacological manipulations and measurements of neural activity to study how our brains respond to rewards using techniques from neuroscience, psychology, economics, and computer science. His recent research with Ray Dolan and Peter Dayan concerns the relationship between rewards, expectations, and subjective feelings in both healthy subjects and subjects suffering from depression.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10-12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: robb.rutledge@ucl.ac.uk
Nico Schuck is a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where he works in the lab of Dr. Yael Niv on the neural mechanisms of learning and decision making. His research focusses on understanding how neural representations in ventromedial frontal cortex influence what is learned and how decisions are made. Im September 2017 he will start his own Independent Max Planck Research Group, which will be located at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
Contact:
Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Princeton University
Washington Road
Princeton, NJ 08544
USA
E-mail: nschuck@princeton.edu
Philipp Schwartenbeck is a PhD student at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience (University of Salzburg, Austria) and Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (University College London, UK), having taken a master programme in cognitive neuroscience at the University College London and bachelor programmes in psychology and mathematics at the University of Salzburg. His research focuses on computational models of decision making in behaviour and brain function, particularly using Bayesian inference to understand how generative models of the environment, upon which our choice behaviour is based, are built and compared. In previous work he has used Bayesian inference to model (economic) choice tasks and investigate the neuronal encoding of computational quantities, such as the role of dopamine in belief updates. He is particularly interested in using computational models to understand pathological decision making, which could be associated with a suboptimal model of the environment due to imbalanced model comparison or structure learning. The main project of his PhD is investigating this hypothesis in decision making in substance-based and behavioural addiction.
Contact:
Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
Universität Salzburg
Hellbrunnerstr. 34
5020 Salzburg
Austria
E-mail: Philipp.Schwartenbeck@stud.sbg.ac.at
Nitzan Shahar is a clinical psychologist, recently graduated from Ben-Gurion University, Israel. During his PhD he specialized in decision-making and self- control processes in a healthy population, as well as in psychopathology. He has gained expertise in modelling perceptual decisions (i.e., evidence accumulation modelling), and advanced reaction-time analysis (e.g., ex-Gaussian modelling). Using these methods, he has designed and tested a theoretical model describing the role of procedural working memory in the selection and direction of actions (Shahar et al., 2015). He has used this model to explore the decision mechanisms underlaying deficits in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Obssesive-compulsive Disorder (OCD). He is also interested in computerized cognitive training and has performed several large-scale working memory training studies. Finally, he is a licensed clinical psychologist in Israel, and has been working as a clinician for several years. He was recently awarded the Rothschild post-doctoral fellowship for Israeli students, allowing him to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Prof. Dolan's lab.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10-12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: shahar.nitzan@gmail.com
Chris Summerfield’s work seeks to understand the neural and computational mechanisms by which humans make decisions. Decision making has been studied from a number of different perspectives in psychology, neuroscience, machine learning and economics. His work seeks to bridge and unify these approaches, to distil common themes and establish foundational principles. In much of his work, he uses psychophysical testing, computational modelling, and functional neuroimaging to understand how humans categorise perceptual information. Rather than focussing on a single neural system, he studies how decisions recruit multiple cortical and subcortical structures and modulate their network interactions. He tries to understand cognitive processes at the computational level, in order to furnish hypotheses, help interpret findings, and provide clear mechanistic predictions about the neural implementation of decision processes, which can then be tested using eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI. Long-term goals are to provide a complete cognitive and computational description of human decision biases, and to seek to correct them through interventions.
Contact:
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Experimental Psychology
Oxford University
9 South Parks Road
Oxford, OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
E-mail: christopher.summerfield@psy.ox.ac.uk
Wouter van den Bos received his MA in Philosophy, and MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. On April 12, 2011 he defended his dissertation and received his PhD at the Department of Psychology of Leiden University. During 2011-2013 he was a postdoctoral fellow in Psychological Sciences at Stanford University working in Sam McClure’s Decision Neuroscience Lab. He has been a visiting researcher at NCC lab in Princeton and the Institute for Human Development at UC Berkeley. Currently he is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and a member of the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC).
Wouter has a broad background in both neuroscience and developmental psychology and his research broadly investigates the relation between the developing brain and changes in behaviour during adolescence. More specifically, his research is focused on how changes in brain function and structure relate to typical and atypical development of judgment and decision making. To approach these questions, he uses computational models and methods from experimental economics. These models are used to quantify behaviour and the complex processes underlying decision making. The parameters from these models support spanning the bridge between developmental theories and neurobiology, and enables the identification of more specific processes that underlie developmental change. Using these techniques has enabled him to investigate the neurocognitive development of risky and intertemporal choice, social decision making, reward- based and social learning. His work has been funded by the NWO, NIH, DFG and Volkswagen Foundation.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Adaptive Rationality
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: vandenbos@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Arno Villringer studied medicine at Freiburg University (1977-1984). He performed experimental work for his thesis on the regulation of protein synthesis by small RNAs in the Biochemistry Department of Freiburg University (summa cum laude). In 1985 he joined the NMR group at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School where he worked on basic contrast mechanisms for magnetic resonance imaging and established susceptibility based contrast in animal studies. He trained in Neurology at University of Munich (1986-1992). From 1996 to 2003 he was consultant neurologist at the Charité University Hospital Berlin. From 2004 to 2007 he was head of the Department of Neurology at Benjamin Franklin Hospital, Charité. Since 2007 he has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Director of the Clinic for Cognitive Neurology at University Hospital, Leipzig. Since 1999 he has been coordinator of the German Competence Net Stroke and since 2006 speaker of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.
His research focuses on stroke. Specifically, he is interested in pathological brain plasticity in hypertension and obesity leading to stroke and plasticity underlying sensorimotor recovery after stroke. Research studies are performed in humans employing noninvasive techniques such as structural and functional MRI, PET, EEG, EEG/fMRI, fNIRS, TMS, and TDCS.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Stephanstraße 1a
04103 Leipzig
Germany
E-mail: villringer@cbs.mpg.de
Manuel Völkle is professor for psychological research methods at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and an adjunct researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. His research revolves around the development and application of new methods for the study of developmental dynamics in affective and cognitive functioning. Manuel is generally interested in the design and analysis of multivariate empirical studies with an emphasis on the use of structural equation models and longitudinal data analysis. Much of his recent work is concerned with continuous time modelling and the analysis of the intricate relationship of between- and within-person differences in psychological constructs as they evolve over time.
Contact:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Department of Psychology
Max Planck Institute for Human Development (adjunct researcher)
Rudower Chaussee 18 (room 4‘103)
12489 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: manuel.voelke@hu-berlin.de
Iris Wiegand studied psychology at Saarland University from 2004 to 2009, specializing in cognitive and clinical neuropsychology and research methods. In 2010, she joined the Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience at Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). She conducted her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Hermann Mueller and Kathrin Finke on electrophysiological markers of age-related changes in visual attention. After graduating from LMU in 2013, she joined the laboratory of Claus Bundesen at the University of Copenhagen as a postdoctoral fellow. From 2014 to 2016, she worked on her project, Determinants of Mental Capacity, which was funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. In this project, Iris combined computational modelling and neuroscientific methods, particularly EEG, to investigate individual differences in visual attention and memory functions, with an emphasis on adult age differences and clinical conditions.
Earlier this year, Iris was awarded a 3-year Marie Curie Fellowship by the European Research Council. As a Marie Curie Fellow, Iris will be affiliated with Jeremy Wolfe’s visual attention laboratory at Harvard University, and with Doug Garrett’s group at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. In her project, termed MEMORAGE, Iris seeks to overcome the external validity limitations of current laboratory work on adult age differences in attention and memory. Laboratory tasks often make use of short sequences of trials representing clearly defined task sets, whereas real world tasks often tend to be long-lasting, and less well structured. Iris will develop hybrid search-and- foraging tasks that better capture the real-life demands on attention and memory, and in doing so, she will make these demands amenable to experimental manipulation and control. A central goal of her project is to enhance the predictability of individual differences in everyday competence and developmental trajectories in old age.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: wiegand@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Geert-Jan Will is a postdoctoral research associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. He received his BSc and MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience from Utrecht University and his PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research aims to gain a deeper understanding of how social experiences shape emotions, cognitions, and their neurobiological substrates across development. Key interests include neurocognitive processes involved in prosocial behaviour (e.g. sharing and helping), the interplay between social evaluations and self-esteem, and bidirectional links between social experiences and the development of internalizing (e.g. depression) and externalizing (e.g. conduct disorder) psychopathology.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: g.j.will@ucl.ac.uk
Toby Wise completed undergraduate studies in psychology and a master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sussex, before moving to the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London to begin his PhD within the Centre for Affective Disorders. His research focuses on using neuroimaging methods to understand the pathological processes underlying the symptoms of affective disorders, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between unipolar and bipolar depression.
Contact:
NIHR PhD student
Centre for Affective Disorders
Department of Psychological Medicine
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
King's College London
103 Denmark Hill
London, SE5 8AF
United Kingdom
E-mail: toby.wise@kcl.ac.uk
Gabriel Ziegler is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and Dementia Research (headed by Emrah Düzel) at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg. He received his Diploma Degree in Psychology from the University of Jena and a PhD from University of Zurich on the topic ''Lifespan brain structural trajectories and individual differences of growth and decline''. In 2014/15 he was working with the SPM methods group (under John Ashburner and Karl Friston) at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London. His goal is tracking of structural and functional brain changes during maturation, ageing and disease at the level of single subjects using longitudinal data, computational morphometry, quantitative imaging, machine learning, hierarchical and multivariate modelling. He develops and applies techniques in the context of large multi-center brain imaging studies and databanks. A more recent focus of his work is disease progression modelling dynamic systems at the level of individuals in order to understand the mechanisms underyling dementia and cognitive decline.
Contact:
Institute of Cognitive Neurology and Dementia Research
Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
Leipziger Str. 44
39120 Magdeburg
Germany
Email: gabriel.ziegler@med.ovgu.de