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

As a Career Development Research Fellow (CDRF) of St John's College at the University of Oxford, I study how the brain's system-level architecture enables flexible cognition and how it can be translated into large-scale computing systems. My research investigates how the brain is organized—which specialized submodules it contains, what circuit patterns these submodules use, and how its connections and topology allow different regions to communicate and coordinate. With this understanding of how the brain's distributed architecture produces sophisticated cognition, I develop novel algorithms and design specialized computing circuits that implement these principles, working from theoretical models through to hardware system prototypes to understand which specific features bring which specific functional benefits.

The overall goal of this link between biological and artificial computing is to understand the general principles of intelligence in large-scale distributed computing systems. My work addresses both the need for more capable theoretical models that can capture the complexity of modern neuroscientific data and the opportunity to develop more efficient computing architectures by understanding how biological systems achieve intelligence at scale. To bridge the gap between academic research and real-world applications, I also run a startup together with Dan Akarca focused on translating these neuroscience-inspired computing principles into practical technologies.

Before joining St John’s College and the University of Oxford, I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge (at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and ironically also St John’s College; an unnecessary trivia fact is that in Cambridge it is named after St John the Evangelist, in Oxford after St John the Baptist). I worked under the supervision of John Duncan and Matthew Botvinick, in collaboration with both Google DeepMind and Intel Labs. My research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.