Meet The Team

Professor Rick Adams

I did a Medicine and Neuroscience BSc at Cambridge University and Clinical Medicine at UCL. I worked as a medical and psychiatric doctor in North London from 2004-10. From 2009-10 I did an MSc in the Philosophy of Mental Disorder at KCL. From 2010-14, I did my PhD at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL, supervised by Prof Karl Friston.

From 2014-18, I was an NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry at UCL (Division of Psychiatry and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), in Prof Jon Roiser's group. In 2016 I took up a Bogue Fellowship to study at Yale University in Dr Alan Anticevic's group. From 2018-22 I was an MRC Skills Development Fellow in Prof Janaina Mourao-Miranda's group in the Centre for Medical Image Computing and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. I am currently a Future Leaders Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (Division of Psychiatry) and Centre for Medical Image Computing (Dept of Computer Science). My UCL webpage is here.

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Post Doctoral 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 forpeople with psychiatric and neurological disorders.

PhD Students

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.

Shivekiar Tashchioglu

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.

Visiting

Master's Students

Alumni

Dr Ingrid Martin - PhD student

Ingrid's PhD investigated connectivity between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in people with a schizophrenia diagnosis using MEG, and in particular how loss of this connectivity might affect retrieval of associative memories.

Dr Hope Oloye - PhD student

Hope's PhD modelled auditory EEG paradigms from a big transdiagnostic psychosis study (BSNIP) and found that psychosis subgroups ('biotypes') had distinct excitation/inhibition changes in cortical circuits.

Dr Victorita Neacsu - PhD student

Viki's PhD explored 'structure learning' via Bayesian model reduction (within active inference), and found evidence for this process in humans.

Dr Berk Mirza - PhD student

Berk's PhD looked at how a Bayesian model can optimally search for new information, and also various reasons why impulsive behaviour can happen.

Galya Iseli - Visiting PhD student

Galya's PhD (at the University of Basel) looked at fMRI and EEG changes in schizotypy, and modelled these changes using DCM.

Andrew Mitson - Visiting student

Andrew helped to set up our MEG study of excitatory/inhibitory biomarkers in early psychosis (along with Dr Daniel Hauke).

Dr Felice Loi - Master's student

Felice's project looked at brain excitability and connectivity in psychosis spectrum disorders, using resting fMRI data from the BSNIP dataset.

Lioba Berndt - Masters student

Lioba's project modelled the mismatch negativity (auditory oddball) task data from people with 'prodromal' psychosis from the NAPLS2 study.

Amruth Sagar Gadey - Master's student

Amruth's project modelled resting state MEG data from CHR-P, FEP and chronic schizophrenia patients to look at E/I balance abnormalities across illness stages.

Haoming Liu - Master's student

Haoming's project modelled resting state EEG data from the Bipolar and Schizophrenia Network for Intermediate Phenotypes (BSNIP) study to look at E/I balance abnormalities across psychosis subgroups.