Andy Johnson 1980-2023

I first met Andy in October 2003 when he was a bright-eyed (and bright) final year undergraduate at Cardiff University. I never fully understood the School's procedure for assigning final-year project students to members of staff, but as luck would have it, Andy was assigned to me.

My habit in those days was to check each student's academic profile, to see what I might reasonably expect. The first thing I noted was that Andy had transferred out of his Law studies at King's in London after 18 months. Quite rightly, he had deduced that life in a grey suit was not for him. The second thing I noted was that Andy was an excellent undergraduate – Firsts all the way, bar one minor blemish in Social Psychology. Well, you can forgive a man for that!

Andy very quickly proved himself to be a formidably able research student. You know the type – he'd worked out the second experiment before I'd fully got to grips with first one. Fantastic! In those early days, Andy had the (misguided) ambition to train as a Clinical Psychologist. I worked very hard (selfishly) to dissuade him of this ambition, and fortunately, was successful.

After obtaining a top First and postgraduate funding from the Medical Research Council, we were off. Three years of fun and experiments followed. Andy fizzing with ideas, me, always a step behind, trying to keep up! I remember sitting in my office one afternoon reading a recently published paper on the topic of 'Chewing Gum and Memory' written by an esteemed (now FRS, no less) colleague at Cardiff. I decided the design and analysis were inadequate, and I didn't think the results reliable. I immediately emailed Andy and suggested we embark on a series of 'Sunday Afternoon' studies looking at chewing gum and its possible effects on cognition. Of course, he agreed: we completed a whole range of studies (alongside Andy's primary PhD work) which resulted in some dozen publications.

The obsession that Universities today have with 'Impact Statements' meant that this 'research hobby' received more media attention than any of our 'proper research' ever did. We enjoyed a 20-year collaboration that produced, and I've just counted them, 30 publications, with a couple more in the pipeline. Andy soon learned not to take it personally when reviewers dismissed our work as 'frivolous' or 'not sufficiently mainstream' or 'lacking an extant theoretical framework' (of course it occasionally lacked an extant theoretical framework – we were pushing the boundaries and took pride in following the path less trodden!!). We stuck to Cromwell's maxim 'consider the possibility that you may be mistaken', and our work was never dismissed as 'poor science'.

Andy was a fine academic but, more importantly, he was an even finer human being. Andy died from pancreatic cancer on the 11th September. He leaves his wife, Charlotte, Alex (9yrs) and Arabella (6yrs).

Chris Miles