11. Jesse Geerts: Finding a good PhD project, reinforcement learning & cognitive maps, and deciding when a paper is ready

Jesse Geerts is a PhD student at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL, in the lab of Neil Burgess. We met a few years ago when we were in the same cohort of the Dual Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences, hosted in the first year in London by UCL and in the second year in Paris by UPMC and ENS.

In this conversation, we talk about Jesse's new paper in PNAS, what it's like to do his PhD programme, how to know when a paper is ready to be submitted, and a bunch of other topics.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:05: During the recording, there was a 4-second delay, but I hope I edited it out alright
0:01:16: Finishing our PhDs
0:15:23: Jesse's experience in the Sainsbury Wellcome PhD Programme
0:23:41: Deciding what PhD project to do (and with whom)
0:54:15: Ask for help (unless the solution can be googled)
0:58:30: Discussion Jesse's PNAS paper
1:30:22: Idea for a new podcast: Ben's Roast
1:33:45: Evaluating whether a model works
1:39:21: When is a paper ready?
1:47:00: What's next for Jesse P. Geerts?

Podcast links

• Website: https://bjks.buzzsprout.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BjksPodcast

Jesse's links

• Website: https://www.jessegeerts.com/
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4xusDVAAAAAJ
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jesse_geerts
• Jesse's PhD programme: https://www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/phd-programme

Ben's links

• Website: www.bjks.blog/
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=-nWNfvcAAAAJ

References
Geerts, J. P., Chersi, F., Stachenfeld, K. L., & Burgess, N. (2020). A general model of hippocampal and dorsal striatal learning and decision making. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Geerts, J. P., Stachenfeld, K. L., & Burgess, N. (2019). Probabilistic successor representations with Kalman temporal differences. arXiv.
Kuper-Smith, B. J., Doppelhofer, L. M., Oganian, Y., Rosenblau, G., & Korn, C. (2020). Optimistic beliefs about the personal impact of COVID-19. PsyArXiv.
Stachenfeld, K. L., Botvinick, M. M., & Gershman, S. J. (2017). The hippocampus as a predictive map. Nature Neuroscience.