Samuel Nellessen | Trainee
Samuel Nellessen, currently a first-year bachelor student in Artificial Intelligence at Radboud University, focuses on the computational modelling of environmental controllability at the Donders Institute. He will explore how the brain distinguishes between control and spectation over our surroundings. Previously, he studied Psychology in Stendal and Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Cognition in Magdeburg, Germany. As a Neurotech Fellow at the Foresight Institute in San Francisco, Nellessen brings a perspective to his current work, which builds on experiences from a Neuromatch Computational Neuroscience summer school and exploratory research projects documented on his blog. These projects include investigations into the intersection of artificial and natural intelligence, artificial sentience and the theory of "Natural Abstractions," which examines the brain's integration of meaningful concepts into cognitive maps. Joining the lab in early 2024, Nellessen will contribute to the ERC ChemControl project, probing the interactions between environmental controllability and dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways under stress through computational modeling