Visiting Fellows
Ben Warner
Ben is a British data scientist renowned for his significant contributions to government, politics, and industry. Warner holds a PhD in Physics from University College London, specialising in single-molecule spintronics. He previously served as the UK Prime Minister’s Chief Digital and Data Advisor, where he established the Prime Minister’s Office Data Science Team. In 2023, he co-founded Electric Twin with Alex Cooper. Throughout his career, Ben has been at the forefront of integrating data science into public policy and business strategy, using advanced analytics to inform critical decisions.
Edward Hughes
Edward is a visiting fellow at the lab, and is a scientific leader in the field of AI and an expert on fast adaptation. He received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Queen Mary University of London, and is currently a Staff Research Engineer att Google DeepMind. He is also an advisor to the Cooperative AI foundation. Edward is a generalist, equally passionate about science, engineering and leadership. He draws inspiration from diverse sources, including cultural evolution, social psychology, economics, organisational design, and meta-learning.


Mikhail Burtsev
Dr Mikhail Burtsev is a Landau AI Fellow at the London Institute. He studied microelectronics at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, before doing his PhD in computer science at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. He held senior research positions at the Anokhin Institute of Normal Physiology and later the Kurchatov Institute, and visiting research positions at Cambridge. He was Scientific Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Moscow, and set up and ran the Neural Nets and Deep Learning Laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Under his leadership, it developed the award-winning open-source conversational AI framework, DeepPavlov.
Dr Burtsev researches the mathematics behind more intelligent AI, including continual learning and memory augmented neural networks, as well as AI assisted maths.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Ivan Kroupin
Ivan is a postdoctoral fellow working on a Templeton Foundation-funded project regarding the origins and mechanisms of social cooperation (comity). More generally he is interested in first-principles theories concerning
- Mechanisms by which cultural features (e.g. social institutions, types of tools, subsistence practices) increase/decrease the success of the broader cultural system and
- Mechanisms by which these features causally relate to changes in the cognitive organization of individual humans.
Current projects include work on the socioecology of (what we measure as) executive function/cognitive control, theoretical work linking cultural systems with theories of biological architecture, as well as ongoing fieldwork with small-scale societies in Bolivia and Namibia/Angola.
Rachel Spicer
Rachel is a postdoctoral fellow working primarily on the Database of Religious History project. She has a background in bioinformatics, completing her PhD at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the University of Cambridge in 2019. During her PhD she investigated whether open metabolomics data was sufficiently annotated to enable data reuse and meta-analysis. She has expertise in R and Python, Data science, open science methods, and metascience
Kiran Basava
Kiran is a postdoctoral fellow working on projects related to cephalopod intelligence. She completed her PhD student in Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford working on the cultural evolution of warfare practices.
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PhD Students
Eric Schnell
Eric is a PhD student in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the LSE. His research interests revolve around cultural evolution, specifically relating to issues of human social network dynamics, cooperation, and competition. His background is in cognitive science and mathematics.
Theiss Bendixen
Theiss is a psychologist and an affiliated graduate student from Aarhus University. His main study area is in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion, focusing on cultural evolutionary accounts of cross-cultural variation in religious beliefs, and how religion might relate to the emergence and stability of cooperation in human societies. He is also involved in meta-science research and science communication. Theiss is affiliated with the Muthukrishna Lab through the Templeton World Diverse Intelligences Initiative “A Theory for Cephalopod Intelligence: The Alien Intelligence in Our Midst”.
Robin Schimmelpfennig
Robin is an affiliated graduate student from the University of Lausanne. In Lausanne, Robin is working with Charles Efferson on a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Prior to his PhD, Robin did his MSc at LSE and worked at Fehr Advice, the Behavioral Economics Consultancy Group. His research interest is in studying human behavior and psychology in relation to social influence, public policy, collective processes.
Bessi Jonsdottir
Bessi is a PhD student in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the LSE. Her research looks at cross-cultural effects for heuristics and biases in behavioural science. Her background is in economics and psychology.
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Lab Manager / Executive Assistant
Sudha Jagatheesh Jayanand
Sudha is an undergraduate BSc Psychological and Behavioural Science student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently working as a lab manager / executive assistant.
Riya Sabherwal
Riya is an undergraduate BSc Psychological and Behavioural Science student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently working as a lab manager / executive assistant.
Jiner Dai
Jiner is an undergraduate BSc Psychological and Behavioural Science student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently working as a lab manager / executive assistant.
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Social Media Manager
Sumayyah Chaudhry 
Sumayyah is an undergraduate BSc Psychological and Behavioural Science student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently working alongside Michael as a social media manager to promote his book and research.
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Research Engineer
Victor Møller Poulsen
Victor is a research consultant working primarily on the Database of Religious History project. He has a background in cognitive science, completing his MSc at Aarhus University in 2022. He has worked on statistical modeling, networks science, and machine learning approaches to understand culture and psychology. He has expertise in social data science broadly, and mostly conducts advanced statistical analysis in Python and R.
Research Assistants
Karlijn Vanoppen
Karlijn Vanoppen is a final-year Psychological and Behavioural Science student at LSE, set to begin a master’s in Behavioural and Decision Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2025. Her interests include behavioural science, computational social science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She hopes to apply behavioural and psychological insights in a data-driven way to support academic research and inform policymaking.
Nivain Goonesekera
Nivain is an undergraduate student in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics. He has a particular interest in how psychology can be applied to communications, technology and everyday decision-making. He is also the founder of a student-led podcast, The Psych Voice, which explores the intersection between psychology and other fields in the digital age.
Bianca D’Agostino
Bianca is a BSc Psychological and Behavioural Science student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a particular interest in cognitive development. She worked on a project exploring user preferences and task performance between text- and voice-based AI, and as a Research Associate for an irrational paper examining students’ perceptions of research culture within her department.
Sophie Rose
Sophie is an undergraduate student at The London School of Economics, studying Psychological and Behavioural Science. She worked on the project in collaboration with Jabra, focusing on the effectiveness and preferences of different AI interfaces for work tasks.
Diana Panizo Madrid
Diana is currently an undergraduate student at the London School of Economics, working on a project commissioned by the UNDP exploring the role of AI in developing countries.
David Feng
David is an undergraduate student studying psychological and behavioural science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently working on a project related to cultural distance.
Nicole George
Nicole is a current BSc student in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the LSE. She is currently working on a project related to Cephalopod intelligence.
Alexander Leonhard
Alexander is a current graduate student in Psychology from Aarhus University. He is currently working on a project related to cephalopod intelligence and evolutionary theories.
Agnieszka Sobala
Agnieszka is an undergraduate student in Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. She is currently working on a project related to assessing the impacts of cultural groups diversity among NHS staff on patients.
Joshua Omotosho
Joshua was an undergraduate student studying Psychology at the University of Lethbridge. He is working on projects related to cephalopod intelligence, artificial neural networks, and informal young carers.