Translational Computational Research
We use computational methods to understand symptoms and neuroimaging findings in people with mental health conditions. We are interested in all mental health conditions, but especially focused on psychosis spectrum disorders (like schizophrenia), ‘functional’ or ‘medically unexplained’ symptoms, and OCD. We use brain imaging (especially MEG and EEG, but also MRI), behavioural tasks, computational modelling, machine learning, and experimental medicine (pharmacological) studies, and collaborate closely with researchers using rodent models, to explore questions such as i) whether excitation and inhibition are ‘imbalanced’ in the brain in psychosis, and if so, whether this can be measured and treated, and ii) how altered function of neural circuits in psychosis can lead to cognitive problems, delusions and hallucinations. For more information, please see our lab website: www.tcplab.org
Group Members
Post-doctoral Research Fellows
Dr. Daniel Hauke
After a bachelor’s in psychology at the University of Göttingen and the Universidade Federal do Ceará, I studied cognitive neuroscience at Maastricht University and wrote my master thesis at the Translational Neuromodeling Unit, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. During my PhD in computer science at the University of Basel and the Krembil Insitute for Neuroinformatics in Toronto, I modelled symptoms of schizophrenia including paranoid delusions (Diaconescu, Hauke & Borgwardt, 2019, Molecular Psychiatry; Hauke et al, 2024, Computational Psychiatry), reasoning biases (Hauke et al, 2021, Schizophrenia Bulletin) and sensory learning (Hauke et al, 2023, Biological Psychiatry: CNNI). I use machine learning to predict clinically relevant outcomes, for example which patients will respond to a psychotherapeutic intervention (Hauke et al, 2021, Schizophrenia Bulletin) and who will transition to psychosis (Das et al, 2018, JAMA Psychiatry). Since 2022, I have joined Rick Adams’ lab at UCL as a postdoctoral research fellow. My work at UCL focusses on developing biophysically-informed models primarily using EEG data to measure neuroreceptor and cell function non-invasively in patients with schizophrenia. To validate these models, I test them in healthy controls undergoing pharmacological interventions (Bedford*, Hauke* et al, 2023, Neuropsychopharmacology; Alloverdi et al. 2024, Under Review) and in collaborations with the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS) consortium and the Bipolar-Schizophrenia Network for Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) consortium in large datasets across the schizophrenia disease trajectory and across transdiagnostic biotypes. I am also interested in extending these approaches to other psychiatric conditions, digital healthcare and understanding the effects of psychedelics on the brain.
Dr Julia Rodriguez-Sanchez
I am a postdoctoral fellow at City (previously a PhD student in the TCP lab, and still collaborating), exploring the role of excitatory and inhibitory cell function in psychosis spectrum disorders with M/EEG and biophysical modelling. I completed my MSci in Neuroscience at UCL in 2020, where I used fMRI to study the effects of antidepressants in people with anxiety, supervised by Prof Oliver Robinson. I was part of the UCL-Birkbeck MRC Doctoral Training Programme, and I also teach cellular neurophysiology to undergraduate students. I am particularly interested in using computational models of the brain to understand the mechanisms underlying psychosis, depression, and anxiety disorders, and ultimately improve treatment.
Dr Anna-Lena Eckert
I am an incoming postdoc at the TCP Lab, where I will investigate computational approaches to goal planning using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and empirical data from rodent and human experiments. I will be a part of the Goal Planning in Psychosis (GPS) project, where we will investigate how goal planning may break down in schizophrenia.
I studied psychology at the University of Marburg before completing my Ph.D. in computational neuroscience at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, under the supervision of Philipp Sterzer (2018-22). My doctoral research examined sensory information processing in psychosis, with a particular focus on testing predictive processing accounts of the schizophrenia spectrum through visual and auditory psychophysics experiments.
Following my Ph.D., I was a postdoc at the University of Marburg within the research cluster The Adaptive Mind (2022-25). There, I worked with Dominik Endres on graph-theoretic approaches to sensory information processing and decision-making in health and disease, with a special interest in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and active inference.
Dr Huw Jarvis
I am an incoming postdoc at the TCP Lab, where I will investigate in vivo imaging measures of excitatory/inhibitory balance using magnetoencephalograhy (MEG) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS).
In 2021-22 I was a Fulbright Scholar in the lab of Dr. Robb Rutledge at Yale University, where I worked on computational models of momentary mood and motivation based on data collected remotely from smartphones.
In 2016-17 I worked at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of the Australian Government, assisting with the translation of research findings into clinical practice guidelines and public health policy.
I have also undertaken internships at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva (2015), at the Grattan Institute in Melbourne (2015), and at Akim Oda Government Hospital in Ghana (2013).
I am interested in bringing computational tools out of the lab and into the clinic to improve treatment for people with psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Dr Xiangshuai Zeng
I am an incoming postdoc at the TCP Lab, where I will investigate mechanisms of auditory hallucinations using both biophysical models of EEG data and spiking neural network models of speech perception.
I completed my PhD in Computational Neuroscience (2020–2025) at Ruhr University Bochum under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Sen Cheng. My doctoral work examined the role of episodic memory in spatial navigation using deep reinforcement learning models, focusing on how different strategies of memory use affect learning speed, behavioral patterns, and neural representations in tasks inspired by rodent studies.
Before my PhD, I earned an MSc in Systems and Control from the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Broadly, I am interested in computational modeling, memory, and perception, and I aim to develop biologically grounded models that help explain the neural mechanisms underlying hallucinations.
PhD Students
Shivekiar Tashchioglu
shivekiar.tashchioglu.18@ucl.ac.uk
I am a first year PhD student at the TCP lab. I’m interested in cognitive models of psychosis.
Oliwia Stecko
I am a second year PhD student at UCL, supervised by Prof Sarah Garfinkel and Prof Rick Adams. I am interested in interoception and its relation to mental health conditions.
Dan Humphries
I am a second year PhD student at KCL, supervised by Dr Izaak Neri, Prof Rick Adams and Dr Dan Bush. I am interested in mathematical modelling of neural circuits and how their functioning might be peturbed in conditions like psychosis.
Visit our lab website here: www.tcplab.org