Dr Matthew Nour
About
Dr Matthew Nour is a Consultant Psychiatrist (BM BCh, MRCPsych, CCT) and neuroscientist (PhD) working at the intersection of computational neuroscience, cognitive science and AI in mental health (‘computational psychiatry’).
He is currently Senior Clinical Researcher in Computational Psychiatry at Oxford (~Asst. Professor) and a Senior Research Fellow in Computational Psychiatry and AI at Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry (London) and Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, KCL (London).
His current work uses functional neuroimaging (MEG, fMRI), naturalistic tasks and AI models (including large language models) to investigate neuro-cognitive processes in psychiatric populations, particularly psychosis.
Dr Nour has received multiple national/international research awards and honours, has more than 12 years' experience as an NHS doctor, technical skill in computational modelling and ML (deep learning, NLP, LLM, fluent Python) and a track record of securing competitive grant funding from Wellcome, NIHR, BMA Foundation, Academy of Medical Sciences and Medical Research Foundation among others.
He has published more than 60 peer reviewed scientific articles, including first/second author papers in Cell, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, PNAS, JAMA Psychiatry, Neurology, Biological Psychiatry, eLife and Trends in Cognitive Science.
Dr Nour studied Medicine, Neuroscience and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He subsequently combined postgraduate medical training with clinical neuroscience research, first as an Academic Foundation Doctor (Oxford) and later as an MRC Clinical Research Fellow (MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and Imperial College London) and an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London).
In 2018, Dr Nour was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to complete a PhD in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at UCL under the supervision of Professor Ray Dolan FRS (UCL) and Professor Zeb Kurth-Nelson (Google DeepMind).
Dr Nour was appointed as an NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford in 2022 and is currently a Senior Clinical Researcher and Consultant Psychiatrist at the University. He holds honorary appointments at UCL and KCL, and was formerly a member of the Google DeepMind NeuroLab.
Expertise
- AI for health (particularly mental health)
- AI societal impact (politics, work, education)
- Brain science (neuroscience)
- Psychology
- AI ethics
Selected publications
- Cognitive maps and schizophrenia (Trends in Cognitive Science, 2025)
- Technological folie à deux: Feedback Loops Between AI Chatbots and Mental Illness (arXiv, submitted Nature Mental Health, 2025)
- Natural Language Processing in Psychiatry: A Field at an Inflection Point (Biological Psychiatry CNNI, 2023)
- Theory-Driven Analysis of Natural Language Processing Measures of Thought Disorder Using Generative Language Modeling (Biological Psychiatry CNNI, 2023)
- Trajectories through semantic spaces in schizophrenia and the relationship to ripple bursts (Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2023)
- Functional neuroimaging in psychiatry and the case for failing better (Neuron, 2022)
- Decoding cognition from spontaneous neural activity (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2022)
- Impaired neural replay of inferred relationships in schizophrenia (Cell, 2021)
Media experience
Dr Matthew Nour has media experience including providing interviews on AI and psychiatry to outlets including the Financial Times, The New York Times, Wired, The Guardian and The Times.
