Micha Heilbron
Group Leader; Assistant professor. Cognitive AI; Computational cognitive (neuro)science
I lead the Language & Predictive Computation group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and hold a part-time position at the University of Amsterdam (ABC). I study how brains and large language models process language — using AI to understand the brain, and neuroscience to build more cognitively plausible models. More info and lab website coming soon!
Before coming to the UvA, I did a post-doc in the Predictive Brain Lab at the Donders Institute, and obtained a PhD at the Donders Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (NL) under the supervision of Floris de Lange and Peter Hagoort, respectively. Before that I was trained in Amsterdam (UvA), London (UCL) and Paris (ENS & UPMC).
I am interested in supervising all kinds of projects. If you would like to work with me, please have a look at my Research page for directions and info.
news
| Mar 5, 2026 | Hiring! Two PhD positions: Developmental language modelling and NeuroAI |
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| Mar 1, 2026 | Started as Indepdent Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics |
| Nov 5, 2025 | I was appointed (co-) chair of the Amsterdam Young Academy |
| Jul 10, 2025 | New podcast appearance for Nemo Kennislink on human memory |
| Jul 7, 2025 | New preprint, on incorporating human-like fleeting memory in transformer language models |
| May 24, 2025 | New preprint, on spatial prediction in mouse visual cortex |
| Apr 17, 2025 | New paper out in eLife, scrutinising evidence for prediction in language comprehension |
| Mar 15, 2025 | I’m giving talks at UCL, Glasgow and Edinburgh next week |
| Nov 5, 2024 | I was appointed as a new member of the Amsterdam Young Academy |
| Jul 17, 2024 | I was awarded an NWO Veni grant to study language comprehension in LLMs and humans |
| Jun 24, 2024 | I am teaching LLMs during the NeuroAI summerschool and the UvA de Groot LLM masterclass |