Hi, I'm St John! I'm a PhD Candidate in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, supervised by Assoc. Prof. Jonathan Shock and Prof. Mark Solms (author of The Hidden Spring). My PhD is funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and Conscium.

My current research focuses on active inference and model-based reinforcement learning — exploring how Bayesian, uncertainty-aware agents can be both sample-efficient and biologically plausible. This work is inspired by affective consciousness research and what it reveals about how minds model and navigate the world.

Prior to this I worked on causality and reinforcement learning, exploring how causal reasoning can make RL agents more robust, efficient, and interpretable.

I maintain this site as a place to share research and anything else I find worth writing about. I'm always happy to chat about shared interests — get in touch if you'd like to connect.

Research

You can find my publications and preprints on Google Scholar and code on my GitHub. I am a member of Assoc. Prof. Shock's research group at UCT.