Rate My Professor Maarten Speekenbrink

Maarten Speekenbrink is Professor of Mathematical Psychology and Head of the Department of Experimental Psychology in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, Faculty of Brain Sciences, at University College London (UCL). He earned his PhD in psychological methodology from the University of Amsterdam in 2005. His career at UCL includes serving as Associate Professor of Mathematical Psychology from 2017 to 2022 before his promotion to Professor and Department Head. Speekenbrink's research examines the cognitive and computational principles of human learning, inference, and decision making, with a focus on how people function effectively in uncertain and dynamic environments. His work employs behavioural experiments, computational modelling, and neuroscience techniques to study topics such as reinforcement learning, uncertainty-guided exploration, generalization, and performance in multi-armed bandit tasks. He directs the Speekenbrink Lab at UCL, which investigates these processes through empirical and theoretical approaches.

Speekenbrink has significantly influenced mathematical psychology through editorial contributions, including Consulting Editor for the Journal of Mathematical Psychology since January 2025 and Associate Editor for Open Mind since May 2023. He is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society since 2020 and held a Turing Fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute from 2021 to 2023. Other honors include the Computational Modelling Prize for higher-level cognition from the Cognitive Science Society in 2014 and membership on the organizing committee for the 39th annual Cognitive Science Society meeting in 2017. His scholarship is evidenced by over 5,000 citations and key publications such as 'Social influence on risk perception during adolescence' (Psychological Science, 2015; with LJ Knoll, L Magis-Weinberg, SJ Blakemore), 'Do humans make good decisions in evidence-driven bandit problems?' (Nature Human Behaviour, 2018; with CM Wu, E Schulz, JD Nelson, B Meder), 'Time pressure changes how people explore and respond in bandits' (Scientific Reports, 2022; with CM Wu et al.), 'Uncertainty Guidance in Learning and Decision Making' (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2022), and the co-authored book 'Mixture and Hidden Markov Models with R' (Springer, 2022; with Ingmar Visser). Speekenbrink convenes advanced statistics modules for postgraduate students, supervises BSc and MSc research projects, and leads funded initiatives like UCL Grand Challenges projects on energy demand forecasting.