Christopher Summerfield
““What I cannot build, I do not truly understand.””
© Catalina Renjifo
Christopher Summerfield is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His research group is well-known for its work on human perception, learning and decision-making. He has published over 100 articles, reviews, and book chapters, many of them in the field’s most visible journals, and won several awards, including the prestigious Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award in 2015, which recognises outstanding contributions to that field.
Christopher has collaborated with researchers from all over the world, with especially prominent links to France (he holds a joint position at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris), Germany, Spain, and the US (he received his PhD from Columbia University in 2005,). As well as English, he speaks French and Spanish.
He has held several prominent service positions, including chairing the Wellcome Trust’s Neuroscience Expert Group, co-organising the annual Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting, founding a summer school on modelling behaviour, and serving as an Academic Editor at the journal PLOS Biology. His freely available undergraduate course ‘How to Build a Brain from Scratch’ is very popular. Christopher is regularly invited to give keynote talks and has been interviewed for numerous podcasts or other broadcast events, such as Brain Inspired, Machine Learning Street Talk, and the Learning Salon. He lives in Oxford.
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