Website: https://tomge.org
Background¶
Originally from the UK, I completed my PhD at University College London under the supervision of Claudia Clopath, Caswell Barry, and Kimberly Stachenfeld, focusing on spatial cognition and computational neuroscience. Following my PhD, I completed an AI residency at Google X working on foundation modeling. I now live in Montreal where I am a postdoctoral fellow and Canadian Neuroanalytics Scholar at Mila (Quebec AI Institute), collaborating with Blake Richards and Guillaume Lajoie.
My research interests lie at the intersection of theoretical neuroscience and machine learning, with a focus on spatial cognition, latent variable models, and foundation models.
Project¶
My CNS project, “Foundation Models for Neuroscience: From Open Brain Data to Neurodegenerative Disease Prediction,” aims to build the first large-scale neuro-foundation model — a general-purpose transformer-based model pre-trained on diverse, open-source neural datasets (e.g., from CONP, OpenNeuro, and the Allen Institute) using self-supervised learning objectives. The core research question is: which invariances within neural data (cross-region, cross-trial, cross-modality) are the most effective learning signals for training such a model? After pre-training, the model will be fine-tuned on clinical tasks, with a focus on dementia and neurodegenerative disease prediction. This work builds on pioneering efforts in the Richards and Lajoie labs at Mila (e.g., POYO, POYO+, POSSM) and draws on techniques from vision foundation models like JEPA and DINO. The model and code will be released open-source.
Key methods: deep learning, latent variable models, self-supervised learning, transformers, fMRI, EEG.
Open-Source Tools¶
I develope several open-source scientific tools and packages, including:
RatInABox — a toolkit for simulating spatial navigation and hippocampal computations, published in eLife
SIMPL — a scalable latent variable analysis tool for neural representations from behaviour, published at ICLR
Other Activities¶
I co-founded TReND-CaMinA, a summer school dedicated to computational neuroscience and machine learning in Africa, for which we have secured over $200,000 in support.