Biography

Professor Susan Gathercole is a cognitive psychologist with interests in memory and learning including the causes of specific learning difficulties in children and how they might be overcome. She has held academic posts at Oxford, Lancaster, Bristol, Durham, York and Cambridge universities, and since 2011 has been Director of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge.  Current projects examine the cognitive mechanisms of working memory and how they might be modified through training, and investigate through a new research clinic the dimensions of cognitive and brain that are often impaired in children with problems in attention, learning and memory. Susan became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014 and was awarded an OBE for services to psychology and education in 2016. In 2017 she has been appointed Chair of the Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience sub-panel for the 2021 REF.