Thijs L van der Plas, D.Phil.

Hello! I’m Thijs, an AI researcher passionate about developing machine learning methods to tackle major challenges in ecological and biological sciences. My academic journey started with a background in physics at Radboud University, the Netherlands (MSc, 2019, BSc 2016), followed by a DPhil in computational neuroscience at the University of Oxford (2023). My neuroscience research largely focused on developing statistical and machine learning techniques to understand how high-dimensional brain activity is organised and can learn to represent sensory stimuli, and using this to investigate cognitive functions such as perception.

I slowly transitioned to ecology during the final year of my PhD, working with the Peak District to develop a high-resolution land cover map of this National Park. I then joined the Alan Turing Institute as a Research Associate, where, in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, I developed methods that integrate remote sensing imagery with citizen-science wildlife observations to predict biodiversity in the UK.

In April 2025, I joined the AI group of Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands, as a postdoctoral researcher to join LTER-LIFE, a national-scale ecological data integration project. Here, I develop a variety of AI methods to advance ecology and ecological data management, building on techniques from computer vision, probabilistic AI, LLMs and representation learning.