This website includes information about my activities in research, doing formal modelling in the life sciences and related philosophy.
Academic bio
I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computing & Communications at the Open University (UK). I study how experiential and evolutionary processes affect agent-environment interaction from a neurobiological perspective, with a focus on attention and movement. My research pursues mechanistic insight into connected cognitive, behavioural and phenomenological phenomena that arise in distinctive ways in psychiatry, life science and the arts. To investigate these phenomena, I use theoretical modelling (formal decision theory, mathematical model-based simulations, systems approaches) and empirical studies. From a philosophy of science perspective, my research attends to how history and values shape scientific models and measures of cognition and behaviour, especially in biomedical and policy interventions related to mental health.
I am Co-Director of the Innogen Institute (based jointly at the Open University and the University of Edinburgh), which connects science, technology and innovation studies with policymaking. I was previously a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, the UCL Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI, Austria); an Anniversary Fellow in Computing and Philosophy at the University of Stirling; and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.