My name is Santiago, my family names are Castiello (father's family name) and De Obeso (mother's family name). In the Spanish tradition we use the first last names of each of our parents. You will find my research under my names: Santiago Castiello or Santiago Castiello de Obeso.

I am a cognitive scientist interested in the applications of intelligent models to psychopathological research. I became interested in psychopathology while being part of the Cochrane Collaboration where I conducted epidemiological research in psychiatry. I was a member of the Cochrane Council and Chair of the steering committee of the Early Career Professional Cochrane Network (from 2021 to 2023).

I currently live in New Haven, CT. Before moving to the US, I lived in Oxford for five years (four years of doctoral training and one year as a Stipendiary Lecturer at Corpus Christi College). Before that I lived my whole life in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.

Current work

I am a postdoctoral associate at the Belief Lab with Prof. Philip R. Corlett at the Wu Tsai Institute and the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University. I conduct research in computational psychiatry, where we use reinforcement learning models to understand high-level beliefs such as delusions (here). I also studied perception of animacy and its relationship with 'high-order' beliefs such as teleological thinking and paranoia (here). Our recent work is on the mechanisms of auditory verbal hallucinations (here).

Personal project

After visiting Prof. Andy Delamater at Brooklyn College in Summer 2017, we started the Associative Learning with Artificial Neural Networks (ALANN) project. We aim to implement computational models (specifically Artificial Neural Networks) to understand the principles of behaviour in living agents. ALANN is a series of scripts that can be used to model any learning paradigm with multiple algorithms (e.g., Rescorla-Wagner, Backpropagation, Contrastive-Hebbian Learning, and more).

Teaching and Consultant activities

In addition to my research work, I currently supervise theses for psychiatry trainees at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz, and collaborate with Prof. Paolo Ossola and his psychiatry trainees at Università di Parma, Italy. I am also interested in applying scientific thought to the industry. I have worked as a scientific advisor for a videogames startup and for a political opinion company (Aragon Estudios de Opinion).

Background

I obtained my D.Phil. (Oxford's equivalent for a Ph.D.) at St Anne's College, University of Oxford, advised by Prof. Robin A Murphy (Computational Psychopathology Research Group) and Prof. Michael Browning (Computational Psychiatry). My doctoral dissertation was a "Computational Dissection of Schizotypy", I conducted behavioural research and computational modelling (e.g., Reinforcement Learning and Bayesian inference) to dissect cognition in the schizotypal personality spectrum. My D.Phil. was fully funded by the Universidad de Guadalajara (V/2021/989 and V/2018/1476). 

I completed a fully funded Masters in Science (M.Sc.; CONACYT, No. 736730) supervised by Prof. José E. Burgos (follow his fantastic YouTube channel) and advised by Prof. Jonathan Buriticá and Prof. Cristiano Valerio dos Santos at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones en Comportamiento (CEIC), Universidad de Guadalajara. There, I used Artificial Neural Networks to model economical decision-making in pigeons (and rats). I completed my undergraduate degree in almost six years, where I graduated as a psychologist and received two years of training as a general engineer at ITESO Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara.

I like playing chess (user in chess.com: psscdo), Age of Empires (AoE) 2 and AoE 3. I am happy to play at any time :) and I have a >1300-day streak in Duolingo,  
I love rollerblading, rowing (male rowing team of St Anne's College), table tennis, yoga, and golf.

You can find me on: Google Scholar, Twitter, GitHub, Researchgate, Linkedin, NeuroTree