Bobby Tromm

I am a PhD student in neuroscience and machine learning at University College London, supervised by Caswell Barry and Tim Behrens. I’m interested in how brains and machines learn abstract models of the world: what the internal representations that support flexible behaviour look like, and why they take the form they do. I use reinforcement learning and successor-representation models to work out which architectures, objectives and policies give rise to grid-like codes.
Before my PhD, I was a research engineer in Nikolas Karalis’s Neuronal Circuits & Brain Dynamics group at the Paris Brain Institute. Earlier, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and a research assistant with Jan Ramaekers at Maastricht University and in Eve Marder’s lab at Brandeis University.
news
Oct 2026
Organising a workshop for MESEC, bridging consciousness science and mechanistic interpretability.
Apr 2026
Joined the As1 Next Generation Advisory Council at Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
Sep 2025
Started my PhD at UCL with Caswell Barry and Tim Behrens, funded by the UCL Research Excellence Scholarship.
Apr 2025
Our paper on the DLPFC in ego dissolution under LSD was published in Human Brain Mapping.
Jul 2024
Presented a poster on changes in functional cortical hierarchy under psychoactive substances at ASSC 27.
Jan 2024
Polaris Fellowship with Entrepreneur First.
writing
9 Dec 2025
25 Apr 2025
8 Jan 2024