Mohamady El-Gaby

Research

I’m interested in how we translate structured knowledge into intelligent behaviour. In particular, I study how neuronal firing and connectivity in brain circuits that control our behaviour learns to embed models of the outside world and our internal goals and uses such models to behave flexibly. Together with collaborators, our work combines insights from both healthy brains and psychiatric conditions and across species and neural networks to understand the successes and failures of cognitive algorithms. 

Education

I completed my undergraduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford before transitioning to Neuroscience for my MSc at UCL. My growing interest in cognitive neuroscience led me to study synaptic mechanisms of memory formation during my PhD with Ole Paulsen at the University of Cambridge. I then returned to Oxford as a postdoctoral scientist, initially working with David Dupret on hippocampal neuronal dynamics underlying memory, and later with Tim Behrens on the algorithms driving abstraction in the medial prefrontal cortex.