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• Fellow of the British Academy • Professorial Fellow, Clare College Cambridge • Fellow of Academia Europaea • Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science • Fellow of the British Psychological Society • Bartlett Prize, Experimental Psychology Society • Elected President of Society for the Neurobiology of Language • Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society • Fellow of the Memory Disorders Research Society

Professor Lorraine K. Tyler

Lorraine K Tyler is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. She heads the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain, an interdisciplinary research group which combines neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and behavioural methods to reveal how the human brain is organised to support language, perception, and meaning. This work is currently supported by her second ERC Advanced Investigator Grant.

Professor Tyler gained her PhD from the University of Chicago in the Department of Behavioural Sciences. Originally trained as an experimental psycholinguist, her longstanding interest in language and the brain initially focused on studies with brain-damaged patients and since 1998 has involved extensive research using a variety of neuroimaging methods (including fMRI and MEG).

She worked at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen before moving to the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and from there to Birkbeck College. She returned to Cambridge in 1998.

 

‘When I was first appointed to a Lectureship in the Department in 1983 there were 13 men and 1 female Demonstrator. I left 5 years later to take up a Chair at Birkbeck College and returned in 1998 as an MRC Research Professor. At that time there were no other female Professors in the Department and a handful in the entire University. Given these circumstances, I set up SAWAG – the Senior Academic Women’s Advisory Group – a pressure group consisting of 12 senior women from around the University. The then Vice-Chancellor – Sir Alec Broers – was very receptive to the group and we met regularly to discuss ways of redressing the staggering gender imbalance. I am delighted that the situation has changed so radically in the intervening years that we now have 7 female Professors in the Department.’

 

 

Prof. Tyler has the honour of being the second ever holder of two ERC Advanced Grants within the University.  She has also been funded by the EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, and Leverhulme Trust. Since 1987,  she has been the Editor in Chief of the journal, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. She is also the leader of the Cam-CAN project – a dataset on healthy ageing which has been used by collaborators and researchers across five continents. 

 

 

Links:

 

Head of CSLB

 

Leader of Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN)

 

Fellow of Clare College

 

Fellow of the British Academy

 

Fellow of the Academia Europaea

 

Fellow of the British Psychological Society

 

Fellow of the American Psychological Society

 

Managing Editor, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, previously known as Language and Cognitive Processes

 

Listen

BBC Radio 4 Frontiers programme: Ageing and the brain

Interview on the Naked Scientists show

Watch

Resilient Brain BPS talk