You can follow me on Twitter @joebarnby

As a cognitive neuroscientist, I am deeply interested in developing better theories of the brain and behavioural basis of social interaction, and how these might be used to explain and treat psychiatric and neurological disorders.

I have spent the past 8+ years developing probabilistic models to study complex cognitive processes such as social observation and decision-making, hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning, and reinforcement learning. My work involves applying techniques from Bayesian modelling, decision theory, and causal inference to extract reliable signals from noisy data.

I currently hold an appointment as an Assistant Professor/ Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London where I lead the Social Computation and Cognitive Representation (SoCCR) lab, as well as holding an honorary research position at King’s College London (KCL).

My group uses computational, imaging, and psychopharmacological methods to better understand the brain basis of how we build beliefs about ourselves and others, in health and disorder. 

I believe that a clear framework for how we represent self and other in the mind will not only improve treatment for psychiatric disorders but also will provide deeper insight into the social basis of the human brain.

 

The group’s most recent work:

Formalising Social Representation to Explain Psychiatric Disorder – Here we apply techniques in AI to understand social dynamics in psychiatric disorders.

The Felt Presence experience: From Cognition to the Clinic  – Here we draw together scientific work that describes and explains the feeling that someone is present in the room without any other evidence.

---

Research Opportunities

PhD Students. I am happy to discuss potential PhD opportunities in my lab. I am looking for candidates with a degree/experience in Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, Computer Science/Engineering or Maths/Statistics. Interest in open-source programming is needed, but loads of prior experience isn’t essential; I am happy to support your development with this. Please feel free to contact me by email. Please include a brief description of your research interests and your CV.

Postdoctoral Associates. I am also happy to discuss opportunities for joining the lab as Postdoctoral Research Associate. Please feel free to get in contact to discuss more.

---

My work and public outreach have been funded and recognised by several major funding and scientific bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, British Association of Psychopharmacology (BAP), Schizophrenia  International Research Society (SIRS), and Medical Research Council (MRC).

You can read my scientific publications here and find my Google Scholar profile here.

You can find code libraries and software I have developed/assisted to develop for scientific purposes here. This includes open data from my past scientific work.

Current SoCCR lab collaborators and partners: