People
Dr Stuart P Wilson
Stuart Wilson is a Lecturer in Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield and a member of Sheffield Robotics.
He has a BSc. in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Sheffield (2006), a MSc in Bioinformatics, Neuroinformatics and Neural Computation from the University of Edinburgh (2007), and a PhD in Theoretical Neuroscience from the University of Sheffield (2011).
He secured a Fellowship Prize from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in 2012 before beginning his current (tenured) position at Sheffield in 2013. Stuart is an early career researcher.
Dr Jonathan Glancy
Jonathan Glancy graduated from the Self-Organisation Lab in 2017 with a PhD in Computational Biology awarded by the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield. He also has a BSc in Mathematics and an MSc in Computational Intelligence.
As part of his PhD work, Jonathan developed our agent-based computational modelling approach to understanding rodent thermoregulatory huddling. He used this approach, together with evolutionary algorithms to investigate a phenomenon called The Baldwin Effect, whereby adaptation to the environment (here, huddling) can accelerate evolution by natural selection.
His PhD was co-supervised by Dr Roderich Gross as part of Sheffield Robotics, and his thesis is titled 'How self-organisation can guide evolution'. Jonathan has now left the lab to begin a promising career in financial modelling.
Dr Giacomo Spigler
Giacomo Spigler graduated from the Self-Organisation Lab in 2018 with a PhD in Computational Neuroscience awarded by the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield.
He joined the Self-Organisation Lab in 2015, after obtaining an MSc in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of James Bednar.
As part of his MSc and PhD work, Giacomo has worked on deriving predictions from self-organising models of cortical map development that can be tested directly via psychophysical and neuroimaging methods. His PhD thesis is titled 'How can plasticity of lateral interactions affect cortical representations?'.
Giacomo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Biorobotics Institute at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy.
Hiroki Urashima
Hiroki Urashima is a gifted software engineer and animation expert who made a valuable contribution to the Self-Organisation Lab as a MSc student in 2013 and then as an MPhil student in 2014.
He worked on a pseudo-physics simulation environment for modelling soft-body deformations of sensory receptor surfaces and the self-organisation of sensor-motor cortical maps.
In 2014 he presented this work at Living Machines 2014, and his submission was awarded a prize for the best paper.