Inaugural British Academy Medal for Dr Richard Cooper
British Academy Medal for Birkbeck scientist's groundbreaking work
Dr Richard Cooper, Department of Psychological Sciences, has been awarded one of three inaugural British Academy Medals.
The British Academy Medals recognise outstanding achievement and are awarded for landmark achievements which transform understanding of a particular subject or field of study.
The Medal was awarded to Dr Cooper and Professor Tim Shallice (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and SISSA, Trieste, Italy) for their book The Organisation of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2011). The book shows how the isolated disciplines of cognitive science and neuroscience, with their disparate intellectual traditions, can be unified. To do this, it examines the assumptions behind the inference procedures used within the brain sciences and demonstrates how converging evidence can address potential failings in those procedures. The methodology developed is used to re-evaluate current findings across a wide range of human cognitive abilities, thus providing structure to a field that is currently conceptually disorganised.
Dr Cooper said: “I’m delighted to have been awarded the British Academy Medal. I have great admiration for the Academy and its work, and I consider receipt of this award to be a real honour. I also find it particularly rewarding that the Academy recognises the potential role of the kind of wide-ranging and in-depth investigation that can only be reported in book form. The award reflects joint work with Professor Tim Shallice, with whom I have had the good fortune to work for over 20 years in a collaboration that is both enjoyable and intellectually stimulating.”
Professor Mike Oaksford, Head of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, said: “It is a great honour for one of our number to be awarded one of three such prestigious prizes from the UK’s premier research organisation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The book for which the award was made is truly groundbreaking and may well set the framework for multidisciplinary work in the cognitive neurosciences for many years. It is a great honour for the Department and the College and couldn’t have happened to a more generous and collegiate member of the department.”