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.

PhD Students

Julia Rodriguez-Sanchez

I am a final-year PhD student at the TCP Lab, 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 am 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.

Ingrid Martin

I am a final-year PhD student at the TCP Lab, co-supervised by Prof Rick Adams and Prof Neil Burgess. I am investigating connectivity between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in people with a schizophrenia diagnosis, using magnetoencephalography (MEG), and in particular how loss of this connectivity might affect retrieval of associative memories.

Hope Oloye

I am a final year PhD student at the TCP lab. I am using dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to investigate the neural processes underlying auditory EEG paradigms and how this might be altered in psychosis spectrum disorders. I’ve also utilised modelling approaches to explore child psychological development. I studied Neuroscience at Oxford University, and completed research exploring attentional trade offs in ADHD before spending time at NYU as a Junior Research Scholar studying social cognition. I am interested in employing computational and transdiagnostic approaches to the study of psychiatric conditions.

Dan Humphries

I am a first 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.

Oliwia Stecko

I am a first 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

Galya Iseli

Andrew Mitson

Master's Students

Alumni

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

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 Bernt - 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.