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 used the first last names of each of our parents. 

I am a cognitive scientist interested in the applications of intelligent models to psychopathological research. I become 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 live 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 used reinforcement learning models to understand high-level beliefs such as delusions (here). I also studied how teleological thinking resembles (or not) to paranoia (here).

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 behaviour in living agents. ALANN is s 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 supervised 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 though to the industry. Thus, I worked as a scientific advisor for Gabu, a startup aiming: "A Safer Digital World for Kids"; and currently I advise 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 studied 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 >1000 days 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, Cochrane Task Exchange