Jacob Bakermans

Jacob is a Royal Society Newton International Fellow in Tiago Branco’s lab at the SWC. He studies how our brain can know what to do even in situations we have never encountered before. This remarkable capacity relies on learning about the commonalities of past experience and figuring out how to apply those to the problem at hand. Jacob’s research focuses on understanding this process as the structured recombination of reusable motifs. Through computational modelling and analysis of neuroimaging and electrophysiological data, he hopes to find out how the brain learns and combines the building blocks of complex but flexible behaviour.

Jacob’s background is in physics, which he studied during his BSc and MSc at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in the lab of Tim Behrens at the University of Oxford, where he investigated how world models are learned and represented. He specifically explored how cognitive maps in hippocampus can be constructed from abstract cortical representations, and how neural replay supports such map-making. Before his current position, he worked as a postdoc with Alex Pouget in Geneva, where he built recurrent neural network models for solving new tasks from minimal experience.