Professor Sanjay Manohar
Associate Professor, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences
About
Professor Sanjay Manohar is a computational neurologist at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. He works at the intersection of biological brain science and artificial neural networks that simulate thought. His recent work provides computational accounts of motivation, memory, language and social cognition at the level of neurons. The models emphasise explaining human behaviour, neural representations and how they go wrong in neurological and psychiatric diseases.
Professor Manohar has written a book on scientific computer programming, Good Coding Practice for Science, and a children’s book about the brain, Adventures of the Brain (2024).
He has experience in industry with five years' consulting for AI companies, and in clinical medicine with 12 years as an NHS consultant in dementia. He is a Medical Informatics Lead, responsible for deployment of clinical software tools at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.
Expertise
- Neuroscience
- AI
- Brain
- Neural networks
- Motivation
- Social cognition
- Neurology
- Machine learning
Selected publications
- Stimulation of the human ventral tegmental area increases strategic betting (2025)
- Understanding disrupted motivation in Parkinson’s disease through a value-based decision-making lens (2025)
- Disentangling the Component Processes in Complex Planning Impairments Following Ventromedial Prefrontal Lesions (2025)
- Detection of cognitive deficits years prior to clinical diagnosis across neurological conditions (2025)
- Machine learning approach for ambient-light-corrected parameters and the Pupil Reactivity score in smartphone-based pupillometry (2024)
- Simple syntactic rules through rapid synaptic changes (2024)
- Gambling on an empty stomach: Hunger modulates preferences for learned but not described risks (2023)
- Quiet Trajectories as Neural Building Blocks (2022)
- Dopamine and reward hypersensitivity in Parkinson’s disease with impulse control disorder (2020)
- Neural mechanisms of attending to items in working memory (2019)
Media experience
Professor Sanjay Manohar has media experience including a guest appearance as a panellist on BBC Radio 4.