Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB (born 12 July 1959) is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London.
He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems.
[12] Karl Friston attended the Ellesmere Port Grammar School, later renamed Whitby Comprehensive, from 1970 to 1977.
He invented statistical parametric mapping: SPM is an international standard for analysing imaging data and rests on the general linear model and random field theory (developed with Keith Worsley).
Friston is principally known for models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions.
His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a variational free energy principle[17] (Active inference in the Bayesian brain[18]).
Currently over 90% of papers published in brain imaging use his method (SPM or Statistical Parametric Mapping) and this approach is now finding more diverse applications, for example, in the analysis of EEG and MEG data.