Maria Baălaăetţ
Computational Neuroscientist
Dr Maria Balaet holds a PhD in Clinical Medicine and Computational Neuroscience from Imperial College London, which was funded by a prestigious award she received in 2019 from the UK Medical Research Council. She is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. With over a decade of research experience, her work focuses on human intelligence and altered states of consciousness.
As part of the Cognitron team, she has developed state-of-the-art computerised cognitive testing for both general and clinical populations, including those with traumatic brain injury (TBI), Parkinson's disease, and REM sleep behaviour disorder. She is currently funded by the UK and US Ministries of Defence via the mTBI-predict consortium to develop precision cognitive biomarkers that predict outcomes following mild TBI. In addition, she received a pilot grant from the Huo Family Foundation to collaborate with the REACT initiative at Imperial College London, exploring links between technology use and cognitive abilities in young people. She is now also running a study on altered states of consciousness during childbirth.
Previously, Dr Balaet led one of the largest longitudinal study arms on recreational drug use and cognition in the general population, recruiting over 500,000 participants through the Great British Intelligence Test (2019-2024). One of the main focus of the study was to investigate how psychedelics affect the mental health and cognitive ability of users. She has also established natural language processing pipelines to survey public opinions about authority figures during the COVID-19 pandemic, an effort that gained her recognition from OpenAI and led to an invitation to the developer roundtable hosted by Sam Altman discussing the future of LLMs in May 2023.
During her eight years at Imperial College, she taught machine learning and neuroscience at postgraduate level (Translational Neuroscience MSc and Experimental Neuroscience MRes), supervised student theses, and mentored students from disadvantaged backgrounds through In2Science UK. She is a regular speaker at national and international scientific meetings, radio shows and podcasts, and is regarded as one of the UK's key science communicators on psychedelics, having delivered more than 50 public lectures in partnership with Seed Talks.
