Sean Cavanagh

I am an incoming academic clinical fellow in psychiatry at King’s College London and South London and the Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. I completed my PhD on the neural basis of working memory and decision making in 2019 at University College London (UCL). I have extensive experience in machine learning analyses with large datasets.

Click here for a copy of my CV

Jon Driver Prize acceptance speech, providing a short summary of my PhD work.

Interview with Dr Chris Smith for the Naked Scientists podcast, providing a short summary of our study on the effects of ketamine on decision making, and its relevance for patients with psychosis.

In 2017, I won the Art of Neuroscience competition for my work 'Unknown Variability: Predicting Responses of Single Neurons'. Each line of the image represents an individual neuron within the Prefrontal Cortex. It shows the variability of responses of single neurons to stimuli predicting rewards, whilst animals are making simple decisions.

Cavanagh, SE ., Hunt, LT., & Kennerley, SW. (2020). A diversity of intrinsic timescales underlie neural computations - Frontiers in Neural Circuits [Link]
Cavanagh, SE., Lam, NH., Murray, JD., Hunt, LT., & Kennerley, SW. (2020). A circuit mechanism for decision-making biases and NMDA receptor hypofunction - eLife [Link] [Code] [Data] [Naked Scientists Podcast]
Cavanagh, SE., Malalasekera, WMN., Miranda, B., Hunt, LT., & Kennerley, SW. (2019). Visual fixation patterns during economic choice reflect covert valuation processes that emerge with learning - PNAS [Link]
Hannah, R., Cavanagh, SE., Tremblay, S., Simeoni, S., & Rothwell, JC. (2018) - Selective suppression of local interneuron circuits in human motor cortex contributes to movement preparation - Journal of Neuroscience [Link]
Cavanagh, SE., Towers, JP., Wallis, JD., Hunt, LT. & Kennerley, SW. (2018). - Reconciling persistent and dynamic hypotheses of working memory coding in prefrontal cortex - Nature Communications [Link]
Cavanagh, SE., Wallis, JD., Kennerley, SW. & Hunt, LT. (2016) - Autocorrelation structure at rest predicts value correlates of single neurons during reward-guided choice - eLife [Link] [Code and Data]

An up to date list of my publications can be found on my Google Scholar Page

I did my PhD research at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology , supervised by Steve Kennerley , Laurence Hunt , and Simon Farmer . I was funded by the Middlesex Hospital Medical School General Charitable Trust, as part of the UCL MBPhD programme. I collaborated with John Murray and Norman Lam at Yale for our project on Ketamine and Decision Making.

I also did my undergraduate research project at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology , supervised by John Rothwell and Ricci Hannah .

I am currently working with Mike Hart from the functional neurosurgery team at St George’s University London to investigate impulsivity in DBS patients.

I was supported in completing my clinical studies by a Foulkes Foundation fellowship.

Outside of work I enjoy running, football, and exploring London.