Dr Sean Froudist-Walsh

I trained in mathematics at Trinity College Dublin before completing an MSc and PhD in neuroscience and neuroimaging at King’s College London. Following postdoctoral research at Mount Sinai and New York University, I established my research group at Bristol. I am now Principal Investigator of the Cognition, Anatomy and Neural Networks group at Oxford and Trinity College Dublin and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Oxford.

Teaching

I teach at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence and computational modelling. At the University of Bristol, I designed and directed undergraduate courses including Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Information Processing and the Brain, covering neural networks, learning, memory, decision-making, representation and the relationship between biological and artificial intelligence.
My graduate supervision interests include computational and cognitive neuroscience, NeuroAI, computational psychiatry, biologically grounded neural networks, large-scale brain modelling, neuroanatomy, neuromodulation and cross-species neuroscience.
I particularly enjoy teaching topics where students from different backgrounds—mathematics, computer science, psychology and neuroscience—can bring different perspectives to the same problem. I try to combine conceptual understanding with quantitative approaches, discussion and open-ended scientific questions, with the aim of helping students move from learning established ideas to thinking critically about problems that remain unsolved.

How do different brain anatomies lead to different types of intelligence, and different ways of perceiving the world?
Tackling this question could help us understand our own brains, build better artificial intelligence, and develop more effective and ethical approaches to translational psychiatry.
Evolution has shaped brain anatomy so that animals can rapidly and efficiently solve the kinds of problems they encounter in their lives. Inspired by this, we build AI and dynamical-systems models that incorporate real brain anatomy and operate under constraints faced by biological brains. This allows us to make directly testable predictions about neuroscience data, and to develop computational models tailored to particular species and, eventually, individuals.
Alongside these curiosity-driven goals, we aim to make translational neuroscience more effective and ethical. By predicting which biological mechanisms are shared across species, our models could help researchers select the most appropriate species for particular experiments, improving the likelihood that findings translate to the human brain while reducing unnecessary animal experimentation.

Select publications

• Joyce*, M.K.P., Ivanov*, T.G., Krienen, F.M. et al., Froudist-Walsh*, S. & Arnsten*, A.F.T. (2025). Higher dopamine D1 receptor expression in prefrontal parvalbumin neurons underlies higher distractibility in marmosets versus macaques. Communications Biology, 8, 974.
• Klatzmann*, U., Froudist-Walsh*, S., Bliss, D.P. et al. (2025). A dynamic bifurcation mechanism explains cortex-wide neural correlates of conscious access. Cell Reports, 44, 115372.
• Ding*, X., Froudist-Walsh*, S., Jaramillo*, J., Jiang, J. & Wang, X.-J. (2024). Cell type-specific connectome predicts distributed working memory activity in the mouse brain. eLife, 13, e85442.
• Froudist-Walsh, S., Xu, T., Niu, M. et al. (2023). Gradients of neurotransmitter receptor expression in the macaque cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 26, 1281–1294.
• Froudist-Walsh, S., Bliss, D.P., Ding, X. et al. (2021). A dopamine gradient controls access to distributed working memory in the large-scale monkey cortex. Neuron, 109, 3500–3520.e13.

Awards and distinctions

• Research Fellowship in the Sciences and Mathematics, St John’s College, Oxford (2026–2029)
• UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (£2.1 million; 2025–2029)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE, 2024)
• Nominated for the University of Bristol Innovative and Inspiring Teaching Award (2025)
• Young Investigator Award, Persistent Maladaptive Behaviours Conference (2016)
• Member of the Society for Neuroscience, Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, Neuroscience Ireland and Organization for Human Brain Mapping.