Professor Eleanor Maguire FBA FMedSci FRS

Eleanor Maguire transformed our understanding of how the brain supports navigation, memory and imagining the future, and in particular the role played by a region called the hippocampus.  She accomplished this with creative experimental paradigms and novel analysis techniques.  By seeking convergent evidence from neuroimaging studies of healthy individuals and neuropsychological studies of patients with memory difficulties, she represented one of the very few who work simultaneously in both disciplines at the highest level.

She undertook her PhD at University College Dublin, Ireland, where she first became interested in memory while working with patients as a neuropsychologist.  She was a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and was an honorary neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London.

Eleanor won numerous prizes for outstanding contributions to science including the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine for her studies of hippocampal plasticity in London taxi drivers, and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award.  She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Professor Eleanor Maguire FBA FMedSci FRS died on 4 January 2025.