Director, Institute for Human-Centered AI (HCA), Computational Health Center, Helmholtz Munich; Professor of Machine Psychology, TU Munich
Dr. Eric Schulz
"I want to understand and create intelligent agents such that we can harness their abilities to advance our knowledge in diverse fields such as in the medical and social sciences.”
Academic Career and Research Areas
Eric Schulz is the Director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HCA) at Helmholtz Munich and PI at Helmholtz AI, part of the Computational Health Center. He joined Helmholtz Munich in December 2023, bringing together cognitive science, machine learning, and neuroscience to study the building blocks of intelligence — both human and artificial. He completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Humboldt University Berlin, followed by an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences (UCL), an MSc in Applied Statistics (University of Oxford), and an MRes in Computer Science (UCL). He received his PhD from UCL in 2017, working with Maarten Speekenbrink on generalization as function learning. From 2017 to 2019, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, working with Sam Gershman and Josh Tenenbaum. He then led a Max Planck Research Group at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen before moving to Munich.
His research field, Machine Psychology, applies experimental designs and computational modeling from psychology to understand how foundation models ‘tick’ — their exploration, collaboration, and cognitive biases. A flagship project is Centaur, a foundation model trained on the Psych-101 dataset (10 million decisions from 160 behavioral experiments across 60,000+ participants), published in Nature in 2025. His longer-term goal is to develop a foundation model for computational psychiatry to identify behavioral signatures of mental health conditions and personalize treatments.
Fields of Work and Expertise
Machine Psychology
Cognitive Science and AI
Foundation Models
Computational Psychiatry
Human-Centered AI
Bayesian Modeling of Cognition
Large Language Models
Behavioral Experiments
Mental Health AI
Professional Background
PhD, University College London (UCL) – generalization as function learning, supervised by Maarten Speekenbrink
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Harvard University (with Sam Gershman and Josh Tenenbaum)
Max Planck Research Group Leader, MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen
Director, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Helmholtz Munich; PI at Helmholtz AI
Honors and Awards
Centaur published in Nature (2025) – first foundation model to both predict and explain human behavior across novel tasks; trained on Psych-101, 10 million decisions from 160 experiments
Three Master’s degrees from UCL, Oxford, and UCL – spanning cognitive science, statistics, and computer science
Google Scholar: 10,500+ citations (h-index 38) – among the most-cited researchers in the cognitive science/machine learning intersection
Max Planck Research Group Leader (2019–2023) – highly competitive independent group leadership at MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen
