Biosketches

Manuel Arnold’s main area of interest is statistical modelling of human behaviour and ageing. Particularly, he is interested in robustness checks and model evaluation. In his dissertation supervised by Andreas Brandmaier and Manuel Voelkle, he focuses on methods to identify heterogeneity and to estimate individual- or subgroup-specific differences in structural equation model parameters. His project aims at contributing to a shift towards an individualspecific understanding of psychological processes rather than an understanding derived from average-trend models. Manuel received a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Hildesheim, a Master’s degree in Psychology from Freie Universität Berlin, and graduated with a Master’s degree in Statistics from Freie Universität, Charité, Technische Universität Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before joining IMPRS COMP2PSYCH, he worked as a research assistant supervised by Manuel Voelkle at the chair of psychological research methods. He is also responsible for the coordination of the Methodological Consulting Unit at the Department of Psychology at Humboldt-Universität.

Contact:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Psychological Research Methods
Rudower Chaussee 18, Room 3'108
12489 Berlin
Germany
Email: arnoldmz@hu-berlin.de

Rachel Bedder is a second-year PhD student on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme researching the relationship between mood disorders and decision making using computational models. She is interested in how knowing about the valence of our future prospects interacts with our decisions, and our emotional response to the outcomes of those decisions. Do we make risky choices when the future looks good? Are we happier about the outcomes of those choices, even when we lose? Rachel explores these questions using probabilistic gambling tasks based in the laboratory, and developed for a smartphone platform for longitudinal data collection. She is particularly interested in how parameters capturing the influence of future prospects on behaviour and mood may change during onset of depressive episodes or during relapse, where negative future prospects may have a greater impact upon mood, even when current outcomes are positive. Rachel has an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL where she was supervised by Neil Burgess and developed a computational model of how implicit racial bias is modulated by immersive virtual reality. After completing her MSc she was a research assistant with Anil Seth at the Sackler Centre, University of Sussex. Rachel has also previously worked as a research assistant in the Division of Psychiatry at UCL examining quality of life in people with moderate-to-severe dementia. She has a BA in Art and Psychology from University of Reading, and used to run the art and neuroscience public engagement company, AXNS Collective.

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: rachel.bedder.15@ucl.ac.uk

Bastien Blain uses computational modelling and neuroimaging to examine the relationship between experienced utility and decision making, and the role of emotions in decision making and learning. He did his PhD in Economics at Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne University under the supervision of Mathias Pessiglione and Guillaume Hollard. In his PhD research, he asked how cognitive fatigue, occurring after many hours of cognitive work (e.g., a workday), alters economic decisions
(e.g., the consumption-saving trade-off). Bastien has taught a course in neuroeconomics since 2013 for the Eco&Psycho Masters degree at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: b.blain@ucl.ac.uk

Andreas Brandmaier obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2012. Currently, he is a senior researcher 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. In particular, 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-constrained 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
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: brandmaier@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Rasmus Bruckner’s current work focuses on the development of computational cognitive models and the application of these methods to behavioural experiments. He mainly uses a probabilistic modelling approach to better understand causes of individual differences in learning and decision making. In one line of research, he examines factors that explain age-related differences in the adjustment of learning rates in stochastic and changing environments. In more recent work, he investigates the computational principles that govern reinforcement learning under considerable perceptual uncertainty. In his future work, he would like to combine cognitive modelling with functional neuroimaging. Since 2015, Rasmus is a fellow of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE). At FU Berlin, he works with Hauke Heekeren and Dirk Ostwald and collaborates with Matt Nassar (Brown University) and Ben Eppinger (Concordia University).

Benjamin Chew is a PhD student at UCL, affiliated with the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging and the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. In 2014, he completed a Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. 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.

Simon Ciranka supervised people with disabilities in a work center before he enrolled at university. In 2011, he started his studies in Psychology at the University of Giessen and obtained his Bachelor’s degree in 2015. Here, he investigated the stability of perceptual priors in human visual processing using multistable motion stimuli. During his studies he spent 6 months abroad in Istanbul. Further he interned as a psychotherapist for half a year at the Psychiatry Department of the Charité University Hospital, Berlin. In 2015 he enrolled at the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience program at TU Dresden. For his Master’s thesis he reformulated a Switching Gaussian filter model of adaptive learning under uncertainty with the help of the Chair of Neuroimaging (Stefan Kiebel/Dimitrije Markovic). He then used this Bayesian account of reinforcement learning under the assumptions of the free energy principle to investigate age differences in social learning, supervised by ndrea Reiter and Shu-Chen Li. Since October 2017, he is a COMP2PSYCH fellow under the supervision of Wouter van den Bos. He investigates adolescents’ decisions under uncertainty and how and why these decisions are modulated by a social context.

Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Adaptive Rationality
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: ciranka@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Christian Doeller is Director of the Department of Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany and is affiliated with the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. He received his undergraduate training in Psychology and Computer Science at several German Universities (Würzburg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Bonn), including research and clinical traineeships at Max-Planck Institutes in Munich and Leipzig and at the Department of Epileptology at University Hospital Bonn. After finishing his PhD with Axel Mecklinger in Saarbrücken in 2005, he worked as a Research Fellow with Neil Burgess at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. In 2010, he was appointed as Principal Investigator and Associate Professor at the Donders Institute at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In 2016, he became Director of the Braathen-Kavli Centre at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Professor of Medicine & Neuroscience at NTNU in Trondheim. He made key discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, reflected in numerous papers in the top scientific journals, such as Nature, Science, and Nature Neuroscience and received several competitive fellowships and prizes (e.g. two-time ERC recipient: ERC Starting Grant, ERC Consolidator Grant; NWO-Vidi award).

Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Stephanstraße 1a
04103 Leipzig
Germany
Email: doeller@cbs.mpg.de

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 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. He has won numerous international prizes, including the 2017 Brain Prize (shared with Peter Dayan and Wolfram Schultz).

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: r.dolan@ucl.ac.uk

Charles Driver runs the Intra-Person Dynamics Across the Lifespan project within the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Charles completed his PhD on hierarchical continuous time dynamic modelling under the supervision of Manuel Voelkle, and is, in general, interested in dynamic systems approaches to understanding change. Because dynamic systems with respect to human behaviour and cognition are still not well understood, such an interest means that Charles is also engaged with statistical approaches for incorporating and understanding differences between subjects, accounting for model uncertainty, explorative analysis, and measurement concerns. Aspects of this work have been incorporated into ctsem, a software package for modelling with hierarchical stochastic differential equations within R.

Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: driver@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Magda Dubois is a first-year PhD student on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. She is interested in investigating the neural and computational mechanisms underlying apathy, a common syndrome associated with multiple psychiatric disorders, and how it emerges during development. In particular, she focuses on how this reduction of motivation during decision making is driven by an imbalance between the effort- and reward-learning pathways and how it is linked to the development of dopamine pathways during adolescence. She will investigate these impairments by combining computational modelling, neuroimaging methods and drug studies. Magda obtained her MSc in Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London where she used deep reinforcement learning algorithms to automate the process of single neuron recognition in microscopy brain scans. Previously she completed her BSc in Bioengineering at EPFL in Switzerland, where she studied the role of predictability on the mechanisms of visual processing.

Samuel Ereira is an MBPhD student at UCL, investigating the computations that underpin cognition in both healthy people and in people with mental health conditions. He is interested in how the brain represents different models of the world and selectively attributes them to “self” and “other” for social cognition. He is also interested in how people can be trained on this process of self–other distinction. Sam began his higher education by studying pre-clinical medicine at Oxford University, where he undertook an intercalated BA in Neuroscience. After graduating, he moved to UCL to continue his clinical studies, where he was offered a place on UCL’s MBPhD programme, granting him the opportunity to interrupt his medical studies and do some full-time research. Sam started his PhD in September 2015, under the supervision of Ray Dolan and Zeb Kurth-Nelson. He also receives weekly clinical teaching from the UCL Medical School and on some weekends he shadows doctors in the emergency department to assist with clerking newly admitted patients. After he finishes his PhD and returns to medical school, he intends on specialising in psychiatry, whilst continuing to conduct his own research. When not doing science Sam likes going on cycling holidays, writing and listening to music and putting on comedy shows.

Stephen Fleming is a Principal Research Associate and Sir Henry Dale Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL, where he is PI of the Metacognition Group (www.metacoglab.org). The group’s research focuses on the mechanisms supporting conscious awareness, metacognition and decision making in the adult human brain. Steve received a BA in Psychology and Physiology at Oxford University (2003–2006) before completing a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL under the supervision of Ray Dolan and Chris Frith, investigating awareness in perceptual decision making (2006–2011). He was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to study with Nathaniel Daw at New York University and Matthew Rushworth at Oxford (2011–2015) to work on computational models of self-monitoring. Steve is Executive Director of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and is actively involved in public engagement, writing general-interest articles for outlets including Aeon and Scientific American. Away from science, he likes sailing, rugby and mixing drinks.

Contact:
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging
Institute of Neurology
University College London
12 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
Email: stephen.fleming@ucl.ac.uk

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 characterised 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 modelling/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 Institute for Human Development
Llifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG)
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: garrett@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Web: www.douglasdgarrett.com

Tobias Hauser is a senior research associate at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, UCL. He is interested in the neurocomputational processes during learning and decision making, and how these go awry in psychiatric disorders. Tobias investigates how cognitive biases in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can help us better understand the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying this disorder. In his work, he combines neuroimaging, neuropharmacology, neuroimaging and computational modelling in his work.

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: t.hauser@ucl.ac.uk

In his research, Hauke Heekeren aims to understand the brain basis of motivated human behaviour: how we learn and assess the value of decision options, how we deliberate, how we choose. Humans have to make decisions each and every day, decisions that differ widely in their degree of complexity and the temporal scales within which they unfold. Some decisions are simple and effortless, such as deciding whether an approaching car will turn left or right, when to cross a busy street, or what to eat for lunch. Other decisions require long deliberation and can have life-shaping consequences, such as which career to pursue, where to live, whom to marry, or whether to take one’s medication. We investigate these different kinds of decision making using neurocognitive methods. Hauke is Professor of Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin. He is Dean of the Department of Education and Psychology as well as Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Berlin (CCNB). Since obtaining his doctoral degree in 2000 for his work on neurovascular coupling, the major focus of his work has been human decision neuroscience. Hauke has received the Rudolph Virchow Award (2004) for excellence in research from the Charité (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) as well as an Emmy-Noether-Award (2005) by the German Research Council (DFG). He is the founding editor of the journal Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience and currently the Chief Editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. He is a past President of the Society for Neuroeconomics. His papers can be found on: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=K1yPoIkAAAAJ&hl=en

Contact:
AB Biologische Psychologie und Kognitive Neurowissenschaft
FB Erziehungswissenschaft und Psychologie
Freie Universität Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
Raum JK 25/216
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: heekeren.sek@loe.fu-berlin.de

Alexandra Hopkins is a second-year PhD student on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. She is interested in investigating the learning and decisionmaking biases that are present in anxiety disorders. Why do anxious people make biased decisions and evaluations for themselves but not others? Are anxious people less optimistic and more realistic and does this realism bias contribute to poor mental health in general? How is inference biased by perceived near miss negative events? She is using computational modelling combined with neuroimaging methods and behavioural shock studies in order to understand the mechanisms underlying these biases and how they contribute to the maintenance of dysfunctional beliefs. Alex completed her MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where she was supervised by Dorothea Hämmerer and worked on a neuroimaging study investigating locus coeruleus integrity in old age. She also has a BSc in Psychology with Neuropsychology from Bangor University, where she worked on a project investigating sensorimotor synchronization, and previously worked as a Research Assistant at UCL on a project investigating adolescent development.

Quentin Huys is a senior clinical lecturer in computational psychiatry and honorary consultant psychiatrist at University College London. He received his MA from Cambridge University and his PhD from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit with Peter Dayan. He was a postdoc at Columbia University, before undergoing clinical training at UCL, obtaining an MD and undergoing specialty training in psychiatry at the University of Zurich. He is interested in using computational neuroscience to solve clinical problems. This involves a combination of theoretical, behavioural, pharmacological and imaging techniques.

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: qh@quentinhuys.com
https://www.quentinhuys.com/

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 reorganisation, maintenance, and compensation.

Contact:
MRC-Cognition and Brain Science Unit
University of Cambridge
15 Chaucer Road
Cambridge, CB2 7EF
United Kingdom
Email: rogier.kievit@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

Niels Kloosterman is a postdoctoral fellow in 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 in 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 a further study he investigates whether 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 Institute for Human Development
Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG)
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: kloosterman@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Julian Q. Kosciessa is a COMP2PSYCH fellow since 2016 and a member of Douglas Garrett’s Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Prior to his doctoral training, he earned a BSc degree in Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin (2014) and an MSc degree in the Mind and Brain program (Brain Track) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2016). His interests concern the neural basis of selective attention and the flexible engagement thereof, particularly with regard to macroscopic neural dynamics. He further has a specific interest in characterising neural rhythms from single-trial electromagnetic recordings. He believes that a joint investigation of EEG and fMRI dynamics can provide mechanistic insights into the origin and functional role of different neural processing modes and their relevance for behavioural flexibility in complex environments. His current projects aim to provide insights into the role of the thalamus in cortical processing and cognition. For this purpose, he investigates putative changes in thalamic structure and function across the lifespan.

Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG)
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: kosciessa@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

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 PhD 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.

Yunzhe Liu is a second-year PhD student on Ray Dolan's team, co-supervised by Tim Behrens at University College London. His research interests focus on the mechanisms of representation, learning and decision making in both biological and artificial intelligence.

Daniel McNamee earned his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in Computation and Neural Systems. Subsequently, he has pursued his postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and University College London. He is interested in the algorithms and representations employed by the nervous system to generate efficient, flexible, and adaptive behaviour.

Contact:
University of Cambridge
Computational and Biological Learning
Department of Engineering
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1PZ
United Kingdom
Email: dcm43@cam.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
Email: rani.moran@gmail.com

Matt Nassar’s goal is to understand how the brain prioritises, segregates and combines information collected in dynamic and complex environments and how this process differs across individuals, pathologies, and healthy ageing. For example, why and how do people prioritise sensory information arriving at certain times or locations? How does the internal arousal state of the brain affect ongoing cognition and sensory processing? What functions might these dynamic fluctuations serve in the real world? Matt’s research addresses these questions by using computational models to link complex behaviour to changes in indirect measures of neural processing (fMRI, EEG, pupillometry) and to investigate computational differences across individuals, pathologies, and the lifespan. One line of his research has used Bayesian models of change-point detection to (1) provide a normative explanation for learning adjustments, (2) link implementation of learning adjustments to arousal systems, (3) identify distinct and anatomically localised uncertainty and surprise signals, and (4) demonstrate that reduced learning in older adults is consistent with an under-representation of uncertainty. Another line of Matt’s research has used information theoretic encoding models to understand how and why people combine specific features in working memory, how this combination may occur, and how differences in excitation/inhibition balance might affect the degree to which information is combined or separated in working memory. Ongoing work is using magnetic resonance spectroscopy to measure individual and age differences in glutamate and GABA levels to test these predictions and understand the degree to which they contribute to agerelated changes in cognition.

Contact:
Brown University
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences
Metcalf Office 153
190 Thayer Street
Providence, RI 02906
USA
Email: mattnassar@gmail.com

Matthew Nour is a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellow at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. He will start his PhD in Computational Psychiatry in October 2018. Prior to starting at UCL Matthew conducted research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (KCL), focusing on the role of dopamine in the pathoaetiology of schizophrenia using PET and fMRI. He is also a psychiatrist in training at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

Weisong Ong is interested in the basic mechanisms of social awareness and interactions. As social creatures, our everyday decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. Critically, deficits in social awareness and interactions are a hallmark of various psychopathologies, most notably in autism. To study the effects of social attention on social interactions, Weisong uses novel behavioural paradigms based on game theory to study cooperation in a setup that allows us to look at twoparty interactions and carry out intracranial neuronal recordings at the same time. This setup also allows us to study the changes of neural activity in response to oxytocin, which has been used therapeutically on individuals with autism.

Contact:
Department of Neuroscience
University of Pennsylvania
3440 Market Street
Suite 440
Philadelphia, PA 19104
USA
Email: weisongo@upenn.edu

Alistair Perry completed his PhD in 2017, under the supervision of Wei Wen (UNSW, Australia) and Michael Breakspear at QIMR Berghofer (Brisbane, Australia). His PhD focused upon the macroscopic changes in structural and functional brain networks that are tied to phenotypic differences in both normal ageing and psychiatric conditions, particularly those teased apart with multivariate analyses. Alistair’s interest has extended towards characterising the neural circuitry linked to interoceptive and reward-based processing. This has led to recent investigations of the neural mechanisms underpinning those with affective disturbances, and neurodegenerative disorders characterised by dopaminergic dysregulation. To address these important research questions, advanced neuroimaging methods have been leveraged, and implemented within translational settings (i.e. Deep Brain Stimulation).

Liliana Polyanska will start her PhD with the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme with Douglas Garrett as her supervisor in October 2018. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Master’s degree in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience from Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working as a student assistant in the Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Liliana is interested in brain network dynamics and influence of emotions and stress on people’s judgment and behaviour. In her future work, she would like to combine neurocognitive and computational methods to investigate how fear influences decision making under perceptual uncertainty.

Contact: Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG)
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: polyanska@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Max Rollwage graduated with a Diploma in Psychology from the University of Marburg in 2015, working on individual differences in risky decision making. Afterwards, he worked as a research assistant at the German Primate Center and European Neuroscience Institute in Goettingen where he conducted experiments regrading metacognition and retrospective effort evaluation. Since September 2016, he is a PhD student of the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme in London. Here he investigates computational models and neuronal mechanisms of metacognition and cognitive flexibility/changes of mind. Moreover, he is interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying extreme and rigid (political) beliefs.

Robb Rutledge is a Principal Research Associate at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and is also affiliated with the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL. His research uses large-scale smartphone-based data collection, 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 concerns the relationship between rewards, expectations, and subjective feelings of happiness 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
Email: robb.rutledge@ucl.ac.uk

Tomás Ryan originally graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 2005 with a BA in Genetics. He completed his PhD in Molecular Neuroscience with Seth Grant at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2009. His thesis work was supported by a Wellcome Trust PhD Fellowship. Following a year as junior research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, he relocated to the USA to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Laureate, 1987) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2010–2016). At MIT he was centrally involved in the development of novel genetic methods that allow for the labelling and manipulation of specific memory engrams in the rodent brain. This work was supported by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and RIKEN Brain Sciences Institute, Japan. In 2016, he started his research group at Trinity College Dublin, where he is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience. Tomás also holds a joint faculty position at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research is supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, a
Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) President of Ireland Young Researcher Award (PIYRA), and a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship.

Contact:
School of Biochemistry and Immunology
& Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN)
Trinity College Dublin
152-160 Pearse Street
Dublin 2
Ireland
Email: tomas.ryan@tcd.ie

Nicolas Schuck is the leader of the Max Planck Research Group NeuroCode – Neural and Computational Basis of Learning, Memory, and Decision Making. Before joining the Max Planck Institute for Human Development as a group leader, he was a predoctoral LIFE fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2010 to 2013, and a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton Neuroscience Institute from 2013 to 2017. He studies how memory and decision-making functions interact in the human brain. His work seeks to address questions about how humans use previous experiences to inform their future choices by applying computational models and pattern recognition algorithms to experimental data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This approach allows him and his team to decode the information hidden in the complex brain activation patterns of humans while they make decisions, and to understand which variables are encoded in different brain areas and in what way. Most recently, his work has focussed on investigating task representations in the orbitofrontal cortex and fast sequences of hippocampal memory representations (replay) in humans using fMRI.

Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Max Planck Research Group “NeuroCode”
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: schuck@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Philipp Schwartenbeck is a postdoc at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging (UCL), and Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (University of Oxford, UK), after completing a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience in Salzburg (Austria). His research focuses on computational models of decision making in behaviour and brain function. The focus of his PhD was to investigate the neural computations of inferring hidden states in the world and comparing different representations of the environment, as well as to understand how these processes might break in psychiatric conditions, such as addiction. Currently, he works on understanding the neural mechanisms of learning the structure of the environment, which provides the basis for inference on choices and states, and how individuals differ in these computations. He is particularly interested in how subjects learn and generalise abstract relational knowledge about the world.

Contact:
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging
Institute of Neurology
University College London
12 Queen Square
London, WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
Email: pschwartenbeck@gmail.com

Yuki Shimura is an MPhil student in the Computational Psychiatry programme at the Max Planck UCL Centre, London. She received her BA from University of California, Los Angeles, where she worked in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UCLA that is directed by Matthew Lieberman. Following graduation, she spent two years at the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab working as a research assistant for Mina Cikara. Yuki aims is to understand how environmental conditions and subjective feelings modulate state-based learning and decisionmaking strategies, such as optimism or pessimism biases. Her current project describes the relationship between mood and learning and the link to optimism in healthy and depressed participants using a combination of computational modelling, large-scale smartphone-based data collection, and neuroimaging.

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: yukis4san@gmail.com

Hrvoje Stojic is a Research Associate at UCL. His main research interest is to understand cognitive processes that underlie human learning and decision making, and how these processes might be implemented in the brain. This is an interdisciplinary topic that spans several disciplines and in his work he relies on research that comes from fields like economics, psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. In his research he uses computational modelling and develops behavioural experiments to evaluate model predictions.

Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: h.stojic@ucl.ac.uk

Wouter van den Bos received his MA in Philosophy, and MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD at the Department of Psychology of Leiden University in 2011. From 2011 to 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 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 of the bridge between developmental theories and neurobiology, and enable 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, rewardbased 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
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: vandenbos@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Web: http://bits-of-information.org/DDN/

Diego Vidaurre is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA), where he has been working since 2012. He isinterested in the development and application of computational methodology for characterising and understanding the complex dynamics of activity in the brain, and for relating these to behaviour in a meaningful way. In particular, he aims to combine data from different sources (fMRI, MEG, EEG, anatomical data) using novel modelling techniques and state-of-the-art machine learning technology. His goal is to use this computational approach to eventually gain new insights into disease mechanism, as well as exploring ageing and developmental processes. Diego obtained his graduate degree in Computer Engineering at the Rey Juan Carlos University, in Madrid, receiving the National Award in that year. After some years working on (non-academic) engineering, he obtained his PhD at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. His thesis explored the use of regularisation techniques in regression and supervised classification.

Contact:
Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA)
University Department of Psychiatry
Warneford Hospital
Oxford OX3 7JX
United Kingdom
Email: diego.vidaurre@ohba.ox.ac.uk

Arno Villringer studied medicine at Freiburg University (1977–1984). He performed experimental work on the regulation of protein synthesis by small RNAs in the Biochemistry Department of Freiburg University for his thesis (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
Email: villringer@cbs.mpg.de

As a Research Associate at the Max Planck UCL Centre and WCHN, G. Elliott Wimmer’s research uses behaviour and functional brain imaging to look at the neural systems that support learning and decision making. In particular, his research looks at how both episodic memories for positive and negative experiences and well-learned value associations influence the choices people make in the future. Before joining UCL, at Columbia University, the UKE in Hamburg, and Stanford University, Elliott had identified interactions between the hippocampus and the striatum during learning and generalisation, demonstrated how single rewarding episodes are reinstated to affect decision making, and established that long-term training is necessary to go beyond transient, working memory-supported reward learning to establish robust and lasting value associations. Currently at UCL, one of several projects focuses on understanding mechanisms of episodic memory replay for valenced experiences using MEG.

Contact:
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
Email: e.wimmer@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
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London to complete 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:
Max Planck UCL Centre
for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Russell Square House
10–12 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5EH
United Kingdom
E-mail: t.wise@ucl.ac.uk

Lennart Wittkuhn first studied Psychology (BSc) at Technische Universität Dresden from 2012 to 2015. For his Bachelor’s thesis, he investigated the effects of age and prefrontal rTMS on value-based learning during sequential decision making. Lennart then continued his studies at TU Dresden within the Cognitive- Affective Neuroscience program and obtained his Master’s degree in 2017. For his Master’s thesis, he investigated whether humans are able to learn multiple states of a dynamic task environment simultaneously. During his studies, he also worked as a student research assistant at the Chair of Lifespan Developmental Neuroscience. Since October 2017, Lennart is a predoctoral fellow of the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH and a PhD student in the Max Planck Research Group “NeuroCode”, led by Nicolas Schuck at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. The primary aim of his dissertation is to investigate hippocampal replay in humans using fMRI.

Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Max Planck Research Group “NeuroCode”
IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
Email: wittkuhn@mpib-berlin.mpg.de