My name is Santiago, my family names are Castiello (father's family name) and De Obeso (mother's family name). As Mexican I follow the Spanish usage of family names, i.e., using both parents family names. I am a psychologist interested in the applications of cognitive and behavioural technology to psychopathological research. For the last few years, I have been part of the Cochrane Collaboration where I have conducted systematic reviews on schizophrenia. In addition, I was a member of the Cochrane Council and the Chair of the steering committee of the Early Career Professional Cochrane Network (from 2021 to 2023). 

I currently lived 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). Besides this, I have lived my whole live in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (obviously for me the most beautiful city on earth).

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. Phil and I are conducting research on the experience of a divine presence, and the intersection between learning, teleological thinking, paranoia, and perceiving agency and 'seeing' intensions.

Personal project

After visiting Prof. Andy Delamater at Brooklyn College in Summer 2017. Andy and I 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 learning and behaviour. ALANN is s series of R scripts that can be used to model any learning paradigm with multiple algorithms (e.g., Rescorla-Wagner, Backpropagation, Contrastive-Hebbian Learning, and more).

Other activities

In addition to my academic work, I currently supervised thesis for psychiatry trainees at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz. At some point, I want to start a precision psychiatry and computational psychopathology research group in México. In addition, I have a strong interest in applying scientific though to companies. Particularly, for the last year I had the opportunity to be the scientific advisor of Gabu, a startup aiming: "A Safer Digital World for Kids".

Background

I got 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 learning research and behavioural computational modelling focusing on schizotypal personality. My D.Phil. was fully funded by the Universidad de Guadalajara (V/2021/989 and V/2018/1476). I studied a fully funded M.Sc. (CONACYT, No. 736730) in behavioural science supervised by Prof. José E. Burgos (follow his fantastic YouTube channel) at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones en Comportamiento (CEIC), Universidad de Guadalajara; and a Bachelor degree in psychology at ITESO Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara.

I like playing chess, Age of Empires (AoE) 2 and AoE 3. I am happy to play at any time :)
Furthermore,  I love rollerblading, rowing (male rowing team of St Anne's College), yoga, golf, and table tennis. 

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