Dr Alexandra Pike (team leader)
University of York
Alexandra is a Lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of York. She is interested in computational modelling (especially reinforcement learning), neuroimaging, and psychometrics. She has experience working in the fields of eating disorders and anxiety disorders.
Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where she was part of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Group, working with Professor Oliver Robinson. She completed her DPhil at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. During her DPhil, I worked on eating disorders and compulsivity, using a range of methods, including multimodal MRI, psychopharmacology, and computational modelling. Her DPhil supervisors were Professor Philip Cowen and Professor Rebecca Park.
She has previously completed an MSc in Neuroscience and a BA in Psychology and Philosophy.
Dr Toby Wise
King’s College London
Toby is a research fellow based at the Department of Neuroimaging within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He uses computational modelling and neuroimaging to understand the mechanisms underlying symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Toby started his academic career with a BSc in Psychology and MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, before completing a PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, where he focused on neuroimaging markers of depression and bipolar disorder. He then completed postdoctoral work at the UCL Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research at UCL and the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech supported by a Sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship from the Wellcome trust.
Dr Lei Zhang
University of Birmingham
Lei is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Human Brain Health and Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK.
He was a Postdoc fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at the SCAN-Unit, University of Vienna. Before that, he worked in the Gläscher Lab (PhD, summa cum laude, and 1-year postdoc) at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and he also worked as a Roche intern for Scientific Exchange (RiSE), based in the Clinical Computational Neuroscience Group at Roche Innovation Center Basel, Switzerland.
His research applies knowledge from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and computational modeling to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the brain computes values and social information when making decisions. For that, he uses behavioral measurements, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and Bayesian hierarchical modeling.
Besides, he is deeply interested in Computational Psychiatry, to assess whether the same computational constructs preserve in psychiatric disorders, and how they might go awry at the neurocomputational level.
Dr Ritwik Niyogi
Freelance AI scientist
Ritwik is an AI research scientist, Neuroscientist and Mental health researcher. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist at MediaTek Research, contributing to the Augur project as a freelance AI scientist.
He was a Sir Henry Wellcome post-doctoral fellow at the UCL-Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. He did his PhD in Machine Learning and Theoretical Neuroscience at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, supervised by Professor Peter Dayan.
Ritwik is passionate about developing novel diagnostics and personalized treatments for mental health.