Hi, I’m Lance!
I am a mathematician working toward understanding and building intelligence. My work formalized an influential theory of brain function, and I now use these ideas to develop AI that learns like we do: by actively exploring and building models of the world, an approach I call active world modeling.
Currently I work as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems with Bernhard Schölkopf, and I lead ATOM, a focused research community of students and researchers working on these questions. Previously, I worked at VERSES with Karl Friston and interned at MILA with Yoshua Bengio.
I have authored over 50 papers across artificial intelligence, mathematics, physics and neuroscience, and received the Best Maths PhD Thesis Prize from Imperial College London in 2025, a Best Paper award from Entropy, and excellence awards from the American Physical Society, G-Research, UK’s EPSRC, Luxembourg’s National Research Fund, Imperial College London, and others.
Get in touch 📩: email me via my CV
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Read about my research on active world modeling.
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