Charline Tessereau, PhD

Postdoctoral Researcher
Peter Dayan Lab
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Munich, Germany

Charline Tessereau is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the lab of Peter Dayan at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. She holds a Ph.D. in Computational Neurosciences from the University of Nottingham, UK, where she graduated in December 2021.  Her doctoral work focused on designing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to understand flexible spatial navigation, specifically in the Morris Watermaze paradigm. Her interdisciplinary research bridged the fields of dynamical systems, RL and spatial navigation, employing methods such as attractor networks, meta-RL, and Successor Representation.


Charline’s research interests revolve around understanding the neural substrates of flexible cognitive behaviors. Together with Peter Dayan, she is currently conducting two projects in collaboration with experimental labs. One of them focuses on hippocampal remapping induced by different forms of uncertainty in reward location, using calcium imaging data. She designed her second postdoctoral project as a theorist within the International Brain Laboratory, where she investigates mechanisms of cognitive control, in a visual decision-making task involving mice and electrophysiology.