The Feldberg Foundation Prize Lecture: Eleanor A. Maguire (London)
All are welcome!
Abstract: A major focus for memory researchers is the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain’s temporal lobes. Damage to the hippocampus is known to have a devastating impact on the ability to form new memories as well as compromising recollection of the past. Most recently the hippocampus has also been implicated in helping us imagine and plan for the future. Despite many decades of research, significant gaps in our knowledge remain, and we still don’t know how exactly activity across millions of hippocampal neurons suppo rts a person’s lifetime of experiences. In this talk I will review the latest advances in brain imaging technology and patient testing, and consider the most recent theoretical frameworks that seek to explain our capacity for mental time travel.
Eleanor Maguire undertook her PhD at University College Dublin where she first became interested in the neural basis of memory while working with patients as a neuropsychologist. She is currently a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, where she is also the Deputy Head. In addition, she is an honorary member of the Department of Neuropsychology, National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London.
Professor Maguire heads the Memory and Space research laboratory at the Centre, where her team uses whole brain and high resolution structural and functional MRI in conjunction with neuropsychological examination of patients in order to understand how memories are formed, represented and recollected by the human brain. She has won a number of prizes, including the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine – awarded for research promoting the public awareness and understanding of science [for her study of black-cab drivers in London; see below]; the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award – in recognition of outstanding contributions to cognitive neuroscience early in one’s career; two Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowships; and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award – made for outstanding contributions to science.
Her famous study of London black-cab drivers: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2004/Features/WTX032958.htm
Eleanor A. Maguire, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London
http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/Maguire/
Feldberg Foundation for Anglo-German scientific exchange (est. 1961)
http://www.feldbergfoundation.org/prizewinners/
