Dr. Thomas Akam

Biography

Thomas Akam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology. His research focuses on understanding how brains generate flexible and adaptive behavior in complex environments. Akam's work involves models of the world, cognitive maps, and learned representations, which enable the planning of action sequences to achieve goals and generalize prior learning to new situations. With a major focus on developing new laboratory behavioral tasks that are rich enough to recruit cognitive mechanisms, his research generates large datasets ideal for quantifying brain activity through computational modeling. He combines modern tools for recording and manipulating brain activity, including silicon probe electrophysiology, fiber photometry, and optogenetics. His work primarily addresses the frontal cortex and hippocampus—regions considered critical for learning using internal models—as well as the dopamine system's role in learning the value of actions in various situations. Akam's approach is strongly influenced by theoretical neuroscience and machine learning, using computational modeling to understand the interplay between behavior and brain activity. He also has a passion for building, having created open-source hardware and software tools for behavioral neuroscience, like pyControl and pyPhotometry, which are utilized in labs around the world.

Research Interests