Hi, I'm Jascha Achterberg, a Neuroscience and AI Researcher at the University of Oxford*.

*(I finished my PhD and moved to the University of Oxford to join Rui Ponte Costa's lab as a postdoctoral research fellow. I will start as a Career Development Research Fellow at St John's College, University of Oxford, in Fall 2025. Information on this website is not quite up to date as it has been extremely busy on my end, but I will share detailed information on what I have been working on very soon!)

As a PhD student at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, I study the general principle underlying computations in biological and artificial intelligence. I combine large scale neuroscience data with artificial neural networks and hardware-optimisation to work out which features underlie highly efficient learning and inference in brains to translate them into neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence (NeuroAI). With this I hope to understand the general principles underlying computation in biological and artificial networks.

To achieve this very interdisciplinary goal, I am supervised by John Duncan (Cambridge) and Matthew Botvinick (Google DeepMind). My research is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. I am also a part of the NeuroAI research team at Intel Labs.

Alongside my basic research, I am working with my colleague Danyal Akarca to translate our models and findings from computational neuroscience to improve mental health diagnostics and treatment. Through our project Psynergy Mental Health we collaborate with the NHS and Cambridge Enterprise to make our solutions available to the public.