People
ECOLOGICAL BRAIN is a cross-disciplinary initiative that investigates brain and behaviour in the real world.
Supervisors come from five different Faculties at UCL: The Faculty of Brain Sciences, The Faculty of Engineering, The Institute of Education, The Faculty of Historical and Social Sciences, the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Roles
Supervisors
Prof Gabriella Vigliocco
Ecological Brain Programme Director, Professor of Psychology of Language, Department of Experimental Psychology
Gabriella is Professor of the Psychology of Language at UCL. She jointly leads the Institute of Multimodal Communication, which is devoted to the understanding of the behavioural and brain mechanisms that allow humans to communicate with one another in the real world. Within the Institute, Gabriella directs the Language and Cognition Lab. She uses methods from psychology, neuroscience and computational modelling and seeks converging evidence from different languages and populations: adults, children, deaf individuals using sign language, and people with aphasia.Throughout the years, she contributed and led a shift in the fields of Psychology, Neuroscience and Linguistics from studying language as a symbolic capacity, evolved, learnt and use separately from the rest of human cognition, to one in which language is grounded in basic sensorimotor functions and that needs to be studied in its ecological niche.
Prof Hugo Spiers
Ecological Brain Programme Deputy Director, Reader in Neuroscience, Department of Experimental Psychology
Prof Hugo Spiers is a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology. He is the group leader of the Spatial Cognition group in the UCL Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience. Prof Spiers has combined numerous methods to explore spatial cognition from single cells to whole brain networks. His research focuses on how the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex contribute to recall of the past, navigation of present and imagination of the future.
Cell and Developmental Biology, Division of Biosciences.
Prof. Caswell Barry joined UCL’s Cell and Developmental Biology department in 2013, previously being based at the Institute of Neurology with Prof. Neil Burgess. His goal is to build a computational understanding of the neural basis of memory. In other words, explaining how a network of neurons in able to store, update, and retrieve information about the world and events that happen within it. To this end he studies spatial memory and its representation in the hippocampal formation. His lab uses tools such as computational modelling and machine learning in conjunction with a variety of experimental techniques to understand how the processes of memory formation and retrieval are triggered.
Prof Tim Behrens
Professor Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.
Prof Behrens studies how our brains learn and represent knowledge about the world in service of flexible behaviour. His work aims to explain complex human behaviour but is grounded in comparisons with animal models and formal mathematical theory. It has therefore found relevance across scales from cells to brain regions and across mammalian species. He has also developed widely used approaches for measuring brain connections non-invasively. A major recent theme has been neural computations in the frontal-hippocampal circuitry. Here, he has shown that cellular computations renowned for their roles in spatial processing, such as grid cells and replay can also represent and manipulate non-spatial knowledge. Using these results, he has built models that help to reconcile our accounts of spatial and non-spatial processing in hippocampus.
DR Dan Bendor
Associate Professor in the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and Department of Experimental Psychology.
Daniel Bendor is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and Department of Experimental Psychology. His current research focuses on how information is encoded by our brain, specifically within the context of auditory perception, memory consolidation, and sleep, using a combination of large-scale electrophysiological, molecular-genetic and computational tools. More details about his research can be found here: https://www.bendorlab.com/
Prof Nadia Berthouze
Professor in Affective Computing and Interaction, UCL Interaction Centre
Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze is a Full Professor in Affective Computing and Interaction at the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC). Her research focuses on designing technology that can sense the affective state of its users and use that information to tailor the interaction process. She has pioneered the field of Affective Computing and for more than a decade she has investigated body movement and more recently touch behaviour as means to recognize and measure the quality of the user experience in ecological settings. She also studies how full-body technology and body sensory feedback can be used to modulate people’s perception of their own body and of their own physical capabilities to improve self-efficacy and self-esteem. She has published more than 200 papers in Affective Computing, HCI, and Pattern Recognition.
Prof Neil Burgess
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology
Neil Burgess is Professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience. His laboratory investigates the neural mechanisms of memory using a combination of methods. These methods include computational modeling, virtual reality, human neuropsychology and functional neuroimaging, 2-photon microscopy and single unit recordings in freely moving rodents. His main goal is to understand how the actions of networks of neurons in our brains allow us to remember events and the spatial locations where they occurred. After studying maths and physics at UCL he did a PhD in theoretical physics in Manchester and a research fellowship in Rome, before returning to UCL funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, Medical Research Council Senior Fellowship and program grant, and the Wellcome Trust. He served as Director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience from Sept 2014-2019 and is affiliated with the UCL Institute of Neurology, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits & Behaviour.
Dr Daniel Bush
Lecturer in Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology
Dr. Bush is a lecturer in the UCL Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology and Principal Investigator in the Human Electrophysiology Lab. Dr.Bush completed an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and a PhD in theoretical neuroscience before moving into human experimental neuroscience. His research focusses on invasive and non-invasive electrophysiology methods, seeking to translate hypotheses originating from theoretical and empirical studies of rodent spatial cognition to the human brain. This makes use of both naturalistic and abstract VR environments to understand the mechanisms of goal-directed navigation across species.
Dr Velia Cardin
Associate Professor, Deafness, Cognition & Language Research Centre & Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL
I am an Associate Professor at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre and the Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL. Using neuroimaging, pharmacological and behavioural techniques, I study neural plasticity to understand the capabilities and constraints of the human brain. My research focuses on deafness, because of the possibility to study neural plasticity in cognitive and sensory systems, and the strong potential for societal impact. I graduated from the Wellcome Trust 4-year PhD Programme in Neuroscience at UCL, and previously worked at the University of East Anglia, Linköping University and Royal Holloway University of London. I am actively involved in communicating research to the general public and to 3rd sector and government organisations. These include participating in the SeeHear program for the BBC, the ‘Music and the deaf brain project’ for Guerilla Science’s Sencity Multisensory event, and the Prevention and Early Intervention Mission Group of the UK Council on Deafness.
Prof Matteo Carandini
Professor of Visual Neuroscience
Matteo Carandini is a neuroscientist at University College London, where he co-directs a laboratory with Kenneth Harris. Matteo graduated in Mathematics from the University of Rome (1990), and obtained a PhD in Neural Science at New York University (1996). After postdoctoral research at Northwestern University, he opened his laboratory in Zurich (1998), then in San Francisco (2002), and finally in London (2008). Matteo’s research focuses on the computations performed by populations of neurons during sensory behavior, and on the circuits supporting these computations. His work revealed surprising features of neural activity across the brain. For instance, that the activity of the visual system is influenced by arousal, body movement, and navigation. His present work focuses on the interaction between vision and navigation, and on the distributed nature of navigational signals across the brain.
Dr Christina Carlisli
Associate Professor/Senior Research Fellow
Christina Carlisi is the group leader of the Cognitive and Affective Neurodevelopment Lab (CANDL). After formative research work at the National Institute of Mental health (NIH) in America, she obtained her PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. She then joined UCL as a Wellcome Trust Fellow and is currently an associate professor in UCL’s Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology. Her work focuses on understanding how young people interact with emotional information in the world around them, including how they respond to positive and negative feedback and learn from this information to make decisions. Her team uses neuroimaging and computational modelling to understand behaviour in real-world contexts.
Prof Maria Chait
Professor of Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL Ear Institute
Maria Chait is a Professor of auditory Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Work in her laboratory, at the interface between cognitive and ‘systems’ neuroscience, is using behavioural methods, eye tracking and functional brain imaging (MEG, EEG and fMRI) to understand the role of the auditory system as the brain’s early warning system and to determine how listeners use sounds to learn about, and efficiently interact with their surroundings. Her research can be found at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ear/research/chaitlab/
DR Robert Cooper
Lecturer, Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, UCL
Dr. Rob Cooper is an EPSRC Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, where he runs the DOT-HUB research group. His research interests focus on the development of new forms of neuroimaging technology for application outside of the traditional scanner environment. While Dr. Cooper works with a range of modalities, his group specialise in the use of light to image human brain function using a technique known as diffuse optical tomography (DOT). His work has driven the emergence of wearable DOT as a viable tool for neuroscience applications, and he and his team are currently applying this new generation of neuroimaging technology to variously study infant cognitive development, brain injury, motor disorders and the healthy adult brain, all in environments and circumstances that have previously been inaccessible to neuroimaging.
Prof Fred Dick
Professor of Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, Director of Birbeck-UCL Centre for Neuroimaging
My work is in large part directed at understanding how the acquisition of complex skills (like spoken language) build on domain-general skills and neural resources. A prevalent assumption is that language learning and use relies on highly specific neural processes. We have shown that multiple aspects of language development, learning, and breakdown are intimately linked with variations in more species-general abilities, such as auditory scene analysis of natural soundscapes and oromotor sequencing abilities. Many of the neural resources underlying processing of complex sensorimotor tasks are shared with analogous tasks performed with language. We have also shown that expertise in different non-linguistic auditory skills strongly shapes neuronal activation preferences in brain regions often cited as speech- and language-specific. To understand how higher-level, human-specific skills such as language emerge from a brain organized around sensorimotor lines, we have also developed novel neuroimaging methods that allow for direct comparisons with functional and myeloarchitectonic organisation in non-human primates.
Prof Steve Fleming
I am Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry. The group’s research focuses on the mechanisms supporting human subjective experience and metacognition by employing a combination of psychophysics, brain imaging and computational modelling.
I received a first class 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 the neural basis of perceptual decision-making (2006-2011). I was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to study with Nathaniel Daw at New York University (2011-2015), building computational models of self-monitoring. I returned to UCL in 2015 to set up the Metacognition Group. My research has been recognised by awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019), the Royal Society Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (2024), and election as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (2023).
Prof Eirini Flouri
Member of the Executive Board, Professor of Developmental Psychology, Institute of Education
Eirini is professor of developmental psychology at UCL Institute of Education. She has led many externally funded research projects on the role of environmental factors in child cognition and behaviour. At the moment she leads two ESRC grants on this topic and collaborates on another 2 (from the ESRC and the British Academy). She works with geographers, statisticians and engineers toward an understanding of the role of the physical environment (e.g., green space, ambient air pollution) for the developing brain. Much of her current research explores the biological mechanisms (e.g., inflammation) through which the physical and the social environment can affect cognition and behaviour. She also supervises externally-funded PhD studentships on this. Most of her related past work focussed on estimating neighbourhood and school effects on child development. That involved linking neighbourhood and school level data to individual level data from the UK birth cohort studies.
Prof Karl Friston
Professor of Neuroscience, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow, and Honorary Consultant in Neuropsychiatry, Institute of Neurology
Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging. He invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). Friston currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions. His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference). Friston received the first Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping (1996) and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999). In 2000 he was President of the international Organization of Human Brain Mapping. In 2003 he was awarded the Minerva Golden Brain Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006. In 2008 he received a Medal, College de France and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2011. He became of Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2012, received the Weldon Memorial prize and Medal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology and was elected as a member of EMBO (excellence in the life sciences) in 2014 and the Academia Europaea in (2015). He was the 2016 recipient of the Charles Branch Award for unparalleled breakthroughs in Brain Research and the Glass Brain Award, a lifetime achievement award in the field of human brain mapping. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Zurich and Radboud University.
Prof Sam Gilbert
I am a senior research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. My research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of executive functions, memory, and social cognition, using behavioural, functional neuroimaging, and computational modelling approaches. A key theme of recent research is “intention offloading”: How do we decide whether to use our own memory or set external reminders to remember delayed intentions? Answering this question can help us to understand how memory processes operate in the real world, and how they are augmented with external resources. As our cognitive processes become increasingly intertwined with external tools, resources, and technologies, studying these processes will play an important role in understanding adaptive human behaviour in everyday life.
Prof Lewis Griffin
Professor of Computational Vision, Department of Computer Science
I use mathematical, computational and psychophysical methods to understand vision, and for applied image analysis (esp. security compass.cs.ucl.ac.uk/). I have wide interests in vision but especially image structure, colour vision, anomaly detection, object recognition and face perception. In recent years I have made increasing use of machine learning methods, including deep learning, but prefer the insight that derives from more explicit models. Image Structure: understanding visual processing as a form of differential calculus computed with non-infinitesimal operators; using those operators to probe the local symmetry type of image locations; organizing the results within an ‘atlas’-like geometry of the visual field. Colour Vision: linking from materials (reflectance), through optics, sensation, perception (colours) to cognition (naming). What geometries can be operationalized for colour space, and what determines them? Why are the basic colour categories so universal?
Prof Antonia Hamilton
Professor of Social Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Prof Antonia Hamilton studies the brain and cognitive mechanisms of human nonverbal social interactions such as imitation and gaze. Her current work explores the interactions of two or more people using new technologies including virtual reality, motion capture, mobile eye tracking and fNIRS as well as more traditional approaches.
Prof Lasana Harris
Professor of Social Neuroscience
Prof. Harris is a social neuroscientist who takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand human behaviour. His research explores the brain and physiological correlates of person perception, social learning, emotions, and inferences, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, punishment, and decision-making. His research addresses questions such as: How do we see people as less than human, and non-human objects as human beings? How do we modulate affective responses to people? How do we make social, legal, ethical, and economic decisions?
Dr Catherine Holloway
Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science
Catherine Holloway’s research revolves around ‘disability innovations’. The starting point for this is understanding the issues faced by disabled people. This can include navigating new cities, reading a book, or surfing the web. Disability is an exciting area, as disabled people are always looking to do things differently and get around barriers, and this makes for interesting problems. Current research which is linked to the ecological brain includes: understanding how people with dementia navigate every day indoor scenarios; measuring the cognitive load of using different wheelchairs in cities; developing new navigation aids for the blind which take account of how they perceive the world; investigating brain plasticity when using a ‘6th finger’ to design better rehabilitation programmes; understanding how humans and robots interact.
Prof Andrew Hudson-Smith
Member of the Executive Board, Professor of Digital Urban Systems and Director of The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
Professor Andrew Hudson-Smith is Director of The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London. Andy is a Professor of Digital Urban Systems and Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet Journal, he is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Greater London Authority Smart London Board. With a research focus on location based digital technologies he has been at the forefront of web technologies for communication, outreach and linked to the digital built environment. He has been a Co-I/Pi on over 20 research grants recent grant output focused on the Internet of Things and urban spaces. His contribution to knowledge and outreach in the fields of the Internet of Things, smart cities, big data, digital geography, urban planning and the built environment have been wide ranging with an impact strategy focused on policy, outreach and the public understanding of science. His research can be found at http://www.digitalurban.org or @digitalurban on Twitter.
Dr Peter Kok
Sir Henry Dale Fellow, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL.
Peter Kok is a Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London. Before joining UCL, he completed his PhD at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in The Netherlands, and was a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University and Yale University. His research programme centres on how our prior knowledge of the world influences the way we perceive it. This work uses a variety of cutting-edge neuroimaging methods, such as layer-specific fMRI at high field (7T), and time-resolved decoding using MEG, to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Ultimately, the goal is to understand how the brain combines prior knowledge and sensory inputs to achieve at a ‘best guess’ of what’s out there in the world.
Dr Anna Kuppuswamy
Principal Research Fellow, Department of Clinical & Movement Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, UCL.
Dr Anna Kuppuswamy is a Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Clinical and Movement Neuroscience in the Institute of Neurology. She is a motor and behavioural neuroscientist and her lab’s main focus is to gain a mechanistic understanding of pathological fatigue in neurological conditions (https://the-effort-lab.wixsite.com/fatigue). Mechanistic work on fatigue revolves around the idea that pathological fatigue is driven by altered sensorimotor processing, including multi-sensory processing. Techniques employed within her lab include non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS, tDCS), brain imaging such as EEG, and psychophysical paradigms.
Dr Pranjal Mehta
Associate Professor Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Brain Sciences.
Pranjal Mehta combines approaches from social-personality psychology and behavioural neuroendocrinology to investigate social hierarchies, emotion, decision making, and social cognition. He conducts this work in both the laboratory and the field. For example, he has led longitudinal research projects of a US presidential election and the covid-19 pandemic. Currently he is expanding his work on social hierarchies to investigate the role of demographic diversity in hierarchies, as well as the implications of his work for public policy. His further research interests are psychophysiological interventions aimed at influencing decision making, attitudes, and health outcomes across the hierarchical spectrum.
Dr Liam Mason
MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow and Lecturer in Clinical Psychology.
Liam Mason combines a rare skillset as a cognitive neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of mood instability and also changes in brain connectivity following psychological therapy. His current research focuses on how moods bias how we perceive reward during decision-making, with a focus on real-life mood and behaviour using smartphone-based momentary assessment and computational modelling. He regularly publishes in leading clinical and neuroscience journals, including JAMA Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Brain. His research is covered by various mainstream media, including interviews on the Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 and Voice of America. Clinically, he provides research supervision, teaching and training to trainee clinical psychologists at the largest course in the UK, and previously co-led the bipolar disorder pathway within the National & Specialist service for psychosis, South London & Maudsley NHS Trust.
Dr Emily Midouhas
Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology, Institute of Education.
Dr. Emily Midouhas is an associate professor of developmental psychology. Her research explores the effects of the built and social environment on the mental health and cognitive functioning of individuals across the lifespan. She uses advanced quantitative techniques to analyse large-scale longitudinal data from complex surveys.
Dr Michael Moutassis
Clinical Lecturer in Neuroscience & Honorary Consultant Medical Psychotherapy
Dr. Moutoussis is a psychiatry researcher and senior medical psychotherapist, who has made key technical contributions to computational psychotherapy ever since the field’s inception in the mid-2000s. However, he advocates that this field, though inspired and cutting-edge, has made limited contributions because its paradigms are too far removed from the real world of mental health, especially from the inter-personal aspects of both psychopathology and of healing. He has pioneered the introduction of stakeholders’ voices in the design of computational psychiatry research, as a matter of ecological validity as well as epistemic justice. He has also advocated for the use of qualitative research to link the real world to the laboratory. After pioneering the computational modelling of subjective attributions, and using functional MRI to study the brain basis of therapy-relevant quantities such as self-esteem, he has turned to electrophysiology as the most promising way forward for naturalistic interpersonal neuroscience.
Dr Sophia Psarra
Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design, The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
Sophia Psarra is a Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Associate Editor of the Journal of Space Syntax. In her research she uses computer modeling of spatial characteristics to analyse spatial layouts in relation to social, cultural, cognitive and organizational performance. This analysis is combined with empirical data of users’ activity to provide a detailed account of the relationship between spatial layout and human exploration patterns in different building types and urban environments. She has collaborated with leading cultural institutions on layout design and visitors’ experience (The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA New York, The Natural History Museum, London, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, The Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Glasgow, The Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and The Manchester City Art Gallery). In 2007 she led an interdisciplinary studio collaborating with neuroscientists on the relationship between space, memory, music and dance (‘Arts and the Brain’) in the context of the ‘Arts on Earth’ initiative, in the University of Michigan.
Dr Daniel Richardson
Reader in Cognitive Science, Department of Experimental Psychology.
Daniel is a Reader in Experimental Psychology at University College London. Prior to that, he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, a graduate student at Cornell, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and an assistant professor at the UC Santa Cruz. His research examines how individuals’ thought processes are related to the people around them. He has authored many scientific articles in cognitive, developmental and social psychology. He received two Provost’s Teaching Awards from UCL, and has performed shows at the London Science Museum and Bloomsbury theatre combining science, music and live experiments on the group mind of the audience. Recently he wrote the popular science book Man versus Mind.
Prof Oliver Robinson
Professor of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Oliver Robinson is co-group leader of the Neuroscience and Mental Health group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Half of the groups work is clinical, but the other half is about trying to better understand ‘normal’ mental health. Anxiety, for instance, can be pathological but is also an adaptive response to potential threats that completely changes the way we behave and process information.
Prof Jennifer Rodd
Reader in Experimental Psychology, Department of Experimental Psychology.
After studying at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh, Dr Rodd moved to UCL in 2003. She is currently a Reader in Experimental Psychology. She conducts research into the factors that contribute to skilled language comprehension. Her research emphasizes the critical role of learning mechanisms for skilled language comprehension. She has a particular interest in understanding how an individual’s idiosyncratic linguistic environment and their individual cognitive/neural learning mechanisms interact to produce variation in linguistic abilities. She has studied language processing using a range of methods including web-based experiments, computational modelling, and neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and MEG. The use of ecological valid stimuli and learning environments is key component to her research. She believes that interdisciplinary approaches are key to making advances in this area. She is currently focused on building collaborations with education researchers and teachers to explore the contributions of schools/nurseries to vocabulary development.
Prof Yvonne Rogers
Member of the Executive Board, Professor of Interaction Design and Director of UCL Interaction Centre, Department of Computer Science.
Since 2011, Yvonne Rogers has been the director of UCLIC and a deputy head of the Computer Science Department. Her areas of research traverses Human-Computer Interaction, ubiquitous computing and behavioural change. She has developed new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., “Being Human: HCI in 2020” that outlined future challenges for Ubiquitous Computing). She has conducted seminal studies on technology interventions to deliver sustainable behavioural change in healthcare and energy use. Her work established “research in the wild” within ubiquitous computing moving the ubiquitous computing community from an emphasis of lab-based research to real world deployment. She was a founding PI of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities that investigated use case inspired basic research activity into the compute fabric needed to support the design of an urban Internet of Things at city scale.
Dr Kerstin Sailer
Reader in Social and Spatial Networks, The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
Dr Kerstin Sailer is Reader in Social and Spatial Networks at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. She investigates the impact of spatial design on people and social behaviours inside a range of complex buildings such as offices, laboratories, hospitals and schools. A particular focus of her work lies on social behaviours such as interaction and encounters, but also how people perceive spaces, how they make choices in buildings (where to move, where to dwell, where to sit) and the associated experience of visibility. An architect by training, her research interests combine the study of spatial layouts using Space Syntax methodologies with space usage behaviours, social networks, organisational theory and psychology.
Prof Tali Sharot
Professor Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology.
Prof. Tali Sharot is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London where she is the director of the Affective Brain Lab. Prof. Sharot is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, with past fellowships including the Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship, Fellow of the Forum of European Philosophy and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received her Ph.D in Psychology and Neuroscience from New York University and her B.A in Psychology and Economics from Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on how emotion, motivation and social factors influence our expectations, decisions and beliefs. Her lab combines methods from neuroscience psychology and economics including neuroimaging, computational modelling and pharmacology manipulation. Prof. Sharot is also the author of The Optimism Bias (2011) and The Influential Mind (2017), both of which received the British Psychological Society Book Award.
Dr Aman Saleem
Associate Professor & Sir Henry Dale Fellow in the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL.
His current research focuses on how visual information is used in active behaviours including movement, navigation, and escape behaviours. An example project in human subjects is investigating how visual processing is altered during movement, which we investigate using psychophysical tests using head-mounted displays in walking subjects. An example project in rodents is measuring brain activity while animals perform tasks in a virtual reality environment. The lab uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches to investigate brain function. The main experimental techniques include: virtual reality in humans and rodents, large-scale extracellular electrophysiology and imaging, and optogenetic manipulation of neural activity. More details about his research can be found here: https://www.saleemlab.com
Dr Jeremy Skipper
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor, Department of Experimental Psychology.
I have been studying the neurobiology of language comprehension for the past 18 years. The emphasis over this period has been on understanding how we perceive speech under more real-world, ecological or naturalistic conditions and how the brain uses the contextual information that accompanies speech in those settings. Before coming to the UK, my work was supported by two relevant US grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). The NSF award was for ‘Acquisition of Neuroimaging Equipment For Acquiring 4-Dimensional Brain Data From Real-World Stimuli.’ The NIH award was to study the ‘Neurobiology of Speech Perception in Real-World Contexts.’ I am currently a Team Member on the ERC award ‘Ecological Language: A multimodal approach to language and the brain’ and am part of a team funded by Amazon’s Audible.com to use fMRI to study people listening to audiobooks and watch movies.
Prof Anthony Steed
Member of the Executive Board, Professor of Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics, Department of Computer Science.
Professor Anthony Steed is Head of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics (VECG) group at University College London. Prof. Steed’s research interests extend from virtual reality systems, through to mobile mixed-reality systems, and from system development through to measures of user response to virtual content. He has worked extensively on systems for collaborative mixed reality. He is the author of the book “Networked Graphics: Building Networked Graphics and Networked Games”. He was the recipient of the IEEE VGTC’s 2016 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award.
Dr Nikolaus Steinbeis
Senior Lecturer and Independent ERC Fellow, Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology.
Dr. Nikolaus Steinbeis is Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology in the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology and Independent ERC Fellow. He is Principal Investigator of the Developmental Change and Plasticity Lab (www.dcp-lab.org). His and his team’s research focuses on how real-life experiences impact brain development. He uses training and enrichment paradigms to gain insight into the operation of sensitive periods in the development of higher-order cognitive control processes.
Prof Nick Tyler
Member of the Executive Board, Chadwick Chair of Civil Engineering, Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering.
Professor Nick Tyler CBE FREng is the Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL. His research involves the study of how people and environments interact. This includes the study of interactions at a variety of scales, including the real world environment and in his life-scale environmental laboratory PEARL (Person Environment Activity Research Laboratory). He has been working for the last 4 years on the challenge of understanding how people with dementia see in the environment and how it might be possible to change environments (including the social and psychological environments as well as the physical on a project funded by ESRC/NIHR and in Japan. He has also been working with the Institute of Ophthalmology and the Ear Institute on the challenges of seeing and hearing in the real world environment.
Dr Sarah White
Associate Professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow
I lead the Developmental Diversity Group at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. We mostly study cognitive differences in the autistic mind throughout the lifespan, using cognitive and neuropsychological tasks, eye-tracking and neuroimaging techniques, and behavioural observation. I’m interested in the universality, specificity and sufficiency of mentalizing differences in explaining the core characteristics of autism, and whether implicit mentalizing difficulties can account for the specific profile of differences in other domains too - lying, laughter, smiles, future thinking, executive function, mental health… to name a few. Most recently, we’ve been studying factors that can modulate mentalizing, especially the cultural environment, the linguistic environment, and the social-relational environment, the latter which we can vary in our experiments. The ultimate aim is to better understand how the autistic mind processes and responds to the environment, in order that evidence-based support can be developed that targets the source and makes a real difference.
Dr Fiona Zisch
Lecturer in Architecture, The Bartlett School of Architecture
Current Students
2020 cohort
Ava Scott, Yan Wu
2021 cohort
Lauren Bennett, Olivia MacMillan-Scott, Sascha Woelk, Ben Borthwick
2022 cohort
Emre Yavuz, Gal Rozic, Ceri Ngai
2023 cohort
George Blackburne, Maria Ahmad
2024 cohort
Juliette Dupertuys, Magdalena Jaglinska, José Maria Baldaque Oliveira Gomes Lopes, Paz Bar-Tal Blanc
2025 cohort
Anna Fakiolas, Stefano James, Anastasia Kokkinou, Lauren Harding-Brown, Bobby Tromm
Management Team
Prof Gabriella Vigliocco
Ecological Brain Programme Director
Prof Hugo Spiers
Ecological Brain Programme Co-Director
Prof Nick Tyler
Ecological Brain Programme Co-Director
Prof Eirini Flouri
Member of the Executive Board
Prof Andy Hudson-Smith
Member of the Executive Board
Prof Yvonne Rogers
Member of the Executive Board
Prof Anthony Steed
Member of the Executive Board
Mrs Warda Sharif
Programme Administrator