Karl J. Friston

Timeline

1. 1980s

   Medical and psychiatric training

   He studies natural sciences, physics and psychology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1980, and completes his medical studies at King's College Hospital in London. In the mid-1980s, he moves to Oxford for psychiatry training and spends two years as a resident trainee at Littlemore Hospital.

2. 1987–1992

   Statistical parametric mapping

   He holds Wellcome Trust research fellowships at the MRC Clinical Neuropharmacology Unit in Oxford from 1987 and at the MRC Cyclotron Unit at Hammersmith Hospital in London from 1988, where he becomes an MRC clinical scientist in 1991. Using PET scans to study schizophrenia, he invents statistical parametric mapping in 1990 and shares the software freely, which helps it spread through brain imaging.

3. 1992–1998

   From La Jolla to Queen Square

   From 1992 to 1994, he is a W.M. Keck Foundation Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California. He comes to Queen Square in London in 1994 as a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Neurology, where his group develops voxel-based morphometry in 1994. University College London makes him a professor at the Institute of Neurology in 1998.

4. 2001–2006

   Dynamic causal modelling

   He becomes Scientific Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in 2001 and invents dynamic causal modelling in 2003, a method for inferring the architecture of distributed systems like the brain. The Minerva Foundation gives him its Golden Brain Award in 2003, and the Royal Society elects him a Fellow in 2006.

5. 2005

   The free energy principle

   Geoffrey Hinton, whose Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit sits a few doors from his Queen Square office, convinces him to think of the brain as a Bayesian probability machine. In 2005, he publishes the first of dozens of papers on the free energy principle, which holds that living systems minimize surprise; he calls the action side of this active inference. By 2018, AI researchers come to his open Monday meetings hoping his ideas can break through roadblocks in artificial intelligence research.

6. 2013–2022

   The Weldon Medal and Hebb Award

   He receives the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology and the Charles Branch Award in 2016. Semantic Scholar ranks him first on its 2016 list of the ten most influential neuroscientists. The International Neural Network Society gives him its Donald O. Hebb Award in 2022.

7. December 2022–June 2026

   Chief scientist at VERSES

   In December 2022, he joins the AI company VERSES Technologies as chief scientist to oversee its advanced AI research and development, where his work on active inference is central to its next-generation systems. VERSES extends his exclusive contract in December 2024 and credits his active inference theories as central to its Genius platform. In June 2026, the company accepts his resignation as chief science officer as it discontinues its AI research and development.

8. 2025–2026

   Professor at UCL Queen Square

   In October 2025, he gives the Fields Institute's Distinguished Lecture Series in Toronto as a professor at UCL's Queen Square Institute of Neurology, closing with a lecture on active inference and artificial curiosity. In June 2026, he opens the IMOL online seminar series as a UCL professor with a talk on the physics of motivation.