Enny van Beest

Dr. Enny van Beest is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, working in the lab of Professors Carandini and Harris. Her research focuses on understanding how spatial and sensory information is integrated across the brain, with particular emphasis on distributed neural coding mechanisms. She has developed UnitMatch, software for tracking neurons across longitudinal recordings using Neuropixels probes.

Education includes a PhD in Neuroscience from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (2020), an MSc in Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Amsterdam (2015), and a BSc in Psychobiology (2013). She has held postdoctoral positions at UCL since 2020, and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2020).

Research interests span vision science, behavioral neuroscience, and computational methods. Recent work includes studying spatial navigation in sensory contexts, basal ganglia pathways' influence on perceptual decisions, and the neural basis of figure-ground perception. Her software contributions have received awards for open science practices.

Awards include the UCL Research Excellence Award (2025) and recognition for her UnitMatch tool (2024). She mentors students and actively participates in initiatives promoting inclusive recruitment and science education. Current projects aim to establish her own research group investigating distributed neural mechanisms of visually guided behavior.