Eleanor Maguire has 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 has 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 represents 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 is currently a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and is an honorary neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London.
Eleanor has 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.
Professional position
- Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London (UCL)
Subject groups
- Anatomy, physiology and neurosciences
Behavioural neuroscience, Development and control of behaviour, Experimental psychology
- Health and human sciences
Clinical neuroscience
Awards
Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture
Used her award to develop an essay competition about a famous female scientist for students aged 12-14 years old.
