I’m Valentin, a computational neuroscientist and psychologist modeling latent dynamics of brain and behavior.
I work with Caroline Charpentier in the Social Learning and Decisions Lab (SLD Lab) at the University of Maryland. I am also an affiliated member of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), an affiliate researcher of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program, an elected Full Member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society, and a 2026 fellow of Thinking about Thinking.
My research asks how people seek information, learn from social experience, and revise beliefs in dynamic environments. I combine behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to study these processes at both behavioral and neural levels. I build generative models to infer hidden cognitive and brain states from noisy observations, linking neural dynamics to cognition and psychopathology. My current work focuses on heterogeneity in trust learning and social decision-making, with applications to computational psychiatry and model-based fMRI.
More broadly, I am interested in the computational principles that link cognition, social behavior, and artificial intelligence, and in how uncertainty, belief, and epistemic norms shape human decision-making. I also write about cognition, AI, and epistemology on Substack. Outside of research, I boulder, I do photography, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about the works of Walt Whitman, Saul Leiter, and The Birth of Tragedy.