CURRENT MEMBERS
Laurence Hunt
Laurence leads the group. He completed his DPhil in Neuroscience at Oxford in 2012, using MEG to study the temporal dynamics of simple economic decision-making, and was then a postdoc at UCL for five years, where he performed comparative experiments between using human neuroimaging and non-human primate neurophysiology. He returned to Oxford to set up the lab in April 2018, and was appointed an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology in 2022. When not in the lab, he is sometimes found playing ultimate frisbee, singing tenor in the local choir, or building Brio train sets with his four-year-old.
Cédric Foucault
Cedric is a postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (Christ Church College). His research focuses on computational models of cognition and human behavior in dynamic environments. He obtained his PhD in neuroscience in Paris in December 2023, where he studied learning and inference under uncertainty in humans using fMRI, behavior, neural networks and Bayesian modeling. He joined Laurence's group in April 2024, where he is expanding his research to decision-making and M/EEG. Before transitioning to neuroscience, Cedric was a computer scientist and worked as a software engineer at Apple in Silicon Valley, California. He draws on this background to develop tools and apply methods from computer science and engineering to further research in neuroscience.
Amy Li
Amy is a first-year DPhil student co-supervised by Laurence Hunt and Sage Boettcher, funded by the Waverley Scholarship and the Clarendon Fund. She is currently using M/EEG combined with behavioural paradigms to investigate human decision-making and information sampling. Broadly, her interests lie in the interplay between attention, memory, and decisions. Prior to her DPhil, Amy completed her BSc (Honours) in Psychology at UNSW Sydney, and afterwards worked as a research assistant in the labs of Brett Hayes (UNSW), Ben Newell (UNSW), and Yee Lee Shing (Goethe University Frankfurt). Outside of the lab, she enjoys underwater fish-spotting (although England is currently making this difficult) and collaborative music-making.
Holly Haines
Holly Haines is a first-year DPhil student in the groups of Laurence Hunt and Mark Woolrich, funded by the ESRC 1+3 scheme in Experimental Psychology. She is currently using MEG and neural networks to investigate how humans and artificial agents flexibly perform multiple cognitive tasks. Besides multi-task learning and compositionality, she is also passionate about dementia and cardiovascular health research – the subject of her prize-winning MSc thesis with Sana Suri, which used longitudinal cohort data to investigate associations between heart and brain health during early life. Outside of the lab, she enjoys competitive dance and rowing - serving as Women’s Captain of Christ Church Boat Club and part of the two-times Headship winning crew.
Yijia (Charlie) Yan
Charlie is a DPhil candidate at NDCN, under the supervision of Ben Seymour and Laurence Hunt. His current research in cognitive computational neuroscience focuses on the cognitive representation of pain learning in the human brain. He uses VR, fMRI, EEG, and RL modelling approaches in his research.
Charlie obtained a BSc in mathematics and applied mathematics at Fudan University, then an MRes degree in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, where he focused on the neuro-computational modelling of head direction cells. Beyond academia, he once worked as a system engineer at NS Solutions to provide customised IoT solutions with data science approaches for industrial manufacturers.
Svenja Küchenhoff
Svenja is a DPhil student co-supervised by Laurence Hunt and Tim Behrens. Her project aims at understanding which neural coding principles allow the brain to represent generalisable knowledge, to use this knowledge to form plans, and to turn these plans into actions. She is using computational models and multivariate pattern analysis to bridge across modalities (ephys and neuroimaging) and species (rodents and humans).
Prior to starting her DPhil, she completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of Heidelberg and the Universitat de Barcelona, an MSc in Neuro-Cognitive Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, and the Neuroscience MSc at the University of Oxford. She is funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fellowship for Biomedical Sciences, the German Scholarship Foundation, and is a Wilfrid Knapp Scholar at St Catz College.
Benjamin Chan
Benjamin is a 4th year integrated Master’s student in FHS Neuroscience doing his Master’s research project in the Hunt lab. His project uses EEG and eye-tracking to study how visual attention influences choice weighting and how attention weighting evolves over time. He is interested in studying the neural processes of decision-making in humans under more naturalistic settings, which he hopes to achieve with his project’s cognitive task. Outside the lab, he plays football and competes in powerlifting, currently leading the University’s Powerlifting Club as Novice Captain.
Kuo Liu
Kuo is a 3rd year undergraduate student in experimental psychology doing an undergraduate research project in the lab. His project uses EEG to investigates how temporal regularities affect evidence weighting in the decision-making process. He is also interested in studying human decision-making processes under more ecologically valid settings. He loves playing snooker in his free time, and dreams that one day he could study decision-making in snooker.
LAB ALUMNI
