Rate My Professor Ingo Bojak

Professor Ingo Bojak is Professor and Deputy Head of School in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading, where he contributes to the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics. He holds the title of Professor for Systems Engineering and Neuroscience, having been appointed Chair in Systems Engineering and Neuroscience in the School of Systems Engineering in 2013. As a computational neuroscientist, Bojak specializes in neural activity at the mesoscopic level, focusing on the collective dynamics of thousands or millions of neurons. His research encompasses mesoscopic cortical dynamics, neural population models, cortical field theory, and brain networks in health and disease, including studies on ageing, epilepsy, and the effects of psychoactive drugs such as ketamine and propofol.

Bojak's career includes obtaining his PhD in Germany, followed by postdoctoral research in Australia at institutions in Adelaide and Melbourne. He served as Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and Tenure Track Lecturer at the Donders Centre for Neuroscience, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, before joining the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics at the University of Birmingham. At Reading, he leads interdisciplinary projects and recently secured a £866,000 three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation for “Developing measures of purpose – platelets, calcium signalling, and model predictive control,” advancing computational methods to quantify purpose-driven activity in biological systems like blood clotting platelets, with applications to cardiovascular disease. Bojak served as Publications Chair for the Organization for Computational Neurosciences in 2023, supervises PhD students, and participates in postgraduate research direction and equality and diversity committees. Key publications include “Modulation of visually evoked cortical fMRI responses by phase of ongoing occipital alpha” (2011), “Ketamine, propofol, and the EEG: A neural field analysis of induced oscillatory activity in the alpha-rhythm” (2013), “Mistake-Making: A Theoretical Framework for Generating Research Questions in Biology, with Application to Mistakes in ‘Living’ Systems” (2022), and “Spontaneous slow wave oscillations in extracellular field potentials of mouse primary visual cortex” (2024).