Professor James Whittington BMBCh (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon)

Professor James Whittington is a computational neuroscientist and AI researcher working at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence and mathematics.

He studied physics, medicine and neuroscience at the University of Oxford, where he completed a DPhil in Neuroscience. He later held a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship at Stanford University.

He studies the neural mechanisms behind flexible behaviour, in particular how structured knowledge is learned and generalised. He combines computational modelling, theory and neuroscience to look at how hierarchical and compositional representations support reasoning, inference and decision-making.

Much of his work is on how the hippocampal formation and prefrontal cortex organise knowledge, and how cognitive maps and structured representations support flexible behaviour in spatial and non-spatial domains.

He also builds and analyses neural networks trained on structured tasks, to find out when and why different representations and algorithms emerge.

He is a Principal Investigator in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He has published in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, ICLR and NeurIPS.

As co-founder of Thinking About Thinking, he helps set its scientific agenda and programmes across AI, neuroscience and the mathematics of intelligence.