PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR [email] [cv] [scholar] [bluesky]

Marco is an MRC Career Development Fellow at UCL's Department of Experimental Psychology. His research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of adaptive human behavior, particularly in social interactions. After completing his undergraduate degree in Germany and a Wellcome Trust-funded MSc and DPhil at Oxford, Marco conducted his postdoctoral work at Oxford and UCL. He established his current group in 2024. He combines computational modelling, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation in his research. His goal is to characterise and causally understand the latent mechanisms and brain processes that enable navigation of complex social environments.

PHD STUDENT

Yongling completed her Ph.D. at Beijing Normal University in 2024, under the joint supervision of Marco at UCL. Yongling continues her collaboration with Marco as a postdoctoral researcher now. She is interested in understanding how people integrate information during social group decisions and the neural mechanisms underlying these processes. Her current work specifically explores how individuals perceive the sense of self and group dynamics within complex social contexts, and how these processes are affected by mental health. She uses computational models of behavior, M/EEG, fMRI, and brain stimulation techniques to study this.

MRES STUDENT

Tianqi Zhan completed a Bachelor of Science in Neural Science at New York University Shanghai where she used behavioral and EEG measurements to study the impact of action on perceptual learning. She seeks to understand action control and monitoring processes across levels, as well as how action interacts with and supports various functions. Recently, she has been particularly intrigued by the ability to evaluate one's performance through metacognition. This fascination has motivated her to work with Marco on her Masters project to study metacognition under social contexts.