Cognitive neuroscientist
My bio
I am Lecturer in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London and Associate Professor in the UCI Department of Cognitive Sciences. My research group is in transition between UC Irvine and UCL, so we have people in both places.
I'm also an affiliate faculty member of the UCI Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science, a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and a Fellow in the CIFAR Brain, Mind & Consciousness program. I am an elected member of the Board of Directors at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and advisor to several corporations and nonprofits including Conscium and PRISM.
Previously, I was on the faculty at UC Riverside in the Department of Bioengineering, with affiliations in the Department of Psychology and the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Neuroscience. I received my Ph.D. in computational cognitive neuroscience from the UCLA Psychology Department, working with Ladan Shams, and then was a postdoc there working with Hakwan Lau.
Research and scientific practice
I lead the Reflexion Lab, a group of interdisciplinary researchers seeking to understand how intelligent systems monitor and model their own knowledge, uncertainty, and experience.
We combine cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, neuroimaging, artificial intelligence, and philosophy to explain how agents come to know what they know — and what any of that has to do with conscious subjective experience.
We study how agents evaluate and represent their own uncertainty, build models of the world — and of themselves — to guide adaptive behavior, and how these capacities relate to conscious experience.
I'm also passionate about new approaches to collaborative research and education that break down geopolitical and financial barriers to success — from how to develop good research questions (a recent piece in Nature Human Behaviour) to promoting equity in credit assignment across neuroscience.
Democratizing science
I'm President, Co-Founder, and Board Chair of Neuromatch, where we've built a scalable, accessible, and democratized educational and community-building enterprise spanning computational neuroscience, deep learning, computational climate science, and NeuroAI. I also serve as Scientific Director of the Neuromatch AI Sentience Scholars program.
Building & leading
Developing best practices for large scientific collaborations in computational cognitive neuroscience.
Explore the project →Leading branches of adversarial collaborations testing higher-order and first-order theories of consciousness.
Launching funding and research initiatives for early-career researchers in consciousness science.
Learn more →Mentoring the next generation of researchers exploring machine sentience and its moral stakes.
See the program →Get in touch