Welcome!

My name is Rylan Schaeffer and I am a Cognitive Neuroscience Master of Research student at University College London, where I conduct research under Dr. Stephen Fleming on metacognition. Before UCL, I worked as a deep learning research intern at Thermo Fisher Scientific and before that, I earned two Bachelor degrees at the University of California, Davis in computer science engineering and statistics, where I received the UC Davis Computer Science Department's 2016 Outstanding Senior Award for teaching three undergraduate courses and for organizing and co-hosting over a dozen faculty talks aimed at bridging the divide between undergraduates and professors. It's generally advisable to share a picture of oneself so that others will know what one looks like; these days I usually have a little less hair.

My background is a little meandering. I won a national championship in speech and debate before college, where I struggled to find my major. I intially tried biomedical engineering, switched to business, and then pursued a major of my own creation aimed at studying persuasion and motivation. Along the way, I served as CFO and COO of ASUCD (overseeing a $12 million annual operating budget and 20+ units) and as the undergraduate representative on the UC Davis College of Engineering Dean Recruitment Advisory Committee.