Royal Society Fellowship

A neuroscientist and BPS Chartered Psychologist who carried out seminal work on taxi drivers and their hippocampal plasticity, Eleanor Maguire, has been named a Royal Society Fellow this year. Professor Maguire's work has transformed understanding of how the brain supports navigation, memory and imagining the future, and in particular the role of the hippocampus.

By combining evidence from neuroimaging studies of healthy individuals and neuropsychological studies of patients with memory difficulties, she represents a researcher who works simultaneously in both disciplines at the highest level. She undertook her PhD at University College Dublin, where she first became interested in memory while working with patients as a neuropsychologist.  

She said: 'I am so honoured and delighted to have been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Sincere thanks go to all my wonderful researchers, colleagues, collaborators and funders over the years that have made doing memory neuroscience so rewarding and so much fun!'

Maguire 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 in London. A fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, she has won numerous prizes for outstanding contributions to science including the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award as well as the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine for her work with taxi drivers.