Biography
Mark Johnson holds the established Chair of Experimental Psychology and was previously Head of the Department of Psychology from 2017-2025. With undergraduate and postgraduate training in behavioural neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology, he helped to establish cognitive neuroscience, and particularly developmental cognitive neuroscience, as new fields of study in the 1980’s and 90’s. In between two periods as a Research Scientist at the MRC Cognitive Development Unit in London (1985-89 and 1994-98), he was Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. In 1997 he moved with MRC funding to Birkbeck, University of London, and established the world-renowned Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development (CBCD). After 20 years as Director of CBCD he then moved to his current post in Cambridge. He has published nearly 500 papers and 10 books on brain and cognitive development in human infants, children and other species.
News feature in Nature:
Interview in Current Biology:
Neurotree:
Neurotree / Mark Johnson's profile
