Paula Parpart, PhD

Paula Parpart is a research fellow at the European Research College (ERC) London, and the ERUNI, and a computational cognitive scientist whose research lies at the intersection of psychology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Her work focuses on the mechanisms underlying learning and decision-making under uncertainty in both humans and artificial agents, combining computational modelling with insights from cognitive science and behavioural research.

She completed her PhD at University College London under the supervision of Professors Bradley Love and Maarten Speekenbrink, where she demonstrated the formal compatibility of heuristic and Bayesian approaches to decision-making. She subsequently held a postdoctoral research position in Professor Christopher Summerfield’s laboratory at the University of Oxford, developing meta-learning systems capable of discovering human decision-making strategies from behavioural data.

Her research has also examined real-world behavioural phenomena at scale, including gambling-related harm, drawing on financial transaction data from millions of UK bank customers in a collaboration involving Lloyds Banking Group and Warwick Business School. This work contributed to research published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Alongside her academic career, Paula is the founder of Brainpool AI, a consultancy connecting leading academic researchers with industry partners to develop advanced machine-learning solutions. At ERC London, her research focuses on computational approaches to human decision-making, human–AI collaboration, democratic information systems, and the psychology of problem gambling.