Headshot of Jakob Voigts.

Jakob Voigts

Group leader
Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Jakob Voigts is a group leader in the Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience research area at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. His lab studies how the brain rapidly builds models of the world and updates hypotheses during naturalistic behavior. He is also co-founder of Open Ephys, an open-source initiative aimed at improving neuroscience research tools.

Voigts studied mathematics at the University of Heidelberg, where he began neuroscience research on naturalistic tactile behavior in Bert Sakmann’s lab with Tansu Celikel. He earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying cortical computations with Christopher Moore and Emery Brown, and completed postdoctoral work with Mark Harnett at MIT before joining Janelia.

Explore more from The Transmitter

A new atlas of abstracts visualizes the field of human brain mapping—where does your work fit?

Satrajit Ghosh talks to Mac Shine about a community-built tool that places every abstract from the 2026 Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting inside a semantic map of the broader neuroscience literature. Finding your neighbors in that space might matter more than you think.

By Mac Shine
9 June 2026 | 3 min read
Illustration of an open journal featuring lines of text and small illustrations of eyes and mouths.

Key role of interferon 1 in maternal immune activation, and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 1 June.

By Jill Adams
9 June 2026 | 2 min read

The illusion of AI consciousness: Lessons from human unconscious processing

Complex, goal-directed and even emotionally responsive behavior can unfold without awareness, providing a useful lens for interpreting artificial systems.

By Vanessa Hadid, Karim Jerbi, John W. Krakauer
8 June 2026 | 0 min watch