The speakers

Dr Michael Anderson

Michael Anderson is a Senior Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and honorary professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. For the past 20 years, Dr. Anderson has been studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which people control unwanted memories, with a particular focus on the involvement of motivated inhibitory control. He is widely known internationally for his work on people’s ability to suppress memories, and the potential role that such mechanisms may play in inducing motivated forgetting, with work appearing in Science and Nature,. His current research focuses on developing a neurobiological model of how inhibitory control may contribute to motivated memory regulation. 

Dr Tim Bussey 

Tim Bussey is Reader in Cognitive & Behavioural Neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has two first degrees, in Psychology and Chemistry, and received a PhD from the University of Cambridge where he worked with Prof Trevor Robbins. He did his post-doctoral work in Cardiff and at the NIMH in Bethesda, MD.

Dr Bussey’s work has involved several different converging methods of enquiry. His experimental work and theoretical ideas have been published and discussed in journals such as Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Current Opinion in Biology, Science, PNAS and Annual Reviews in Neuroscience. Dr Bussey’s achievements include the development of a computer-automated cognitive testing method. Dr Bussey’s theoretical work has challenged prevailing views regarding the organisation of brain function, and has recently been substantiated by a number of studies carried out in his own and several independent laboratories. In another stream of research he has elucidated the neural mechanisms underpinning object recognition memory and related cognitive functions. He is currently using the methods developed in these studies to investigate psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, and is testing potential therapeutic agents.

Dr Amy Milton

Amy Milton is a behavioural neuroscientist based in the Department of Experimental Psychology, in the University of Cambridge. She studies the mechanisms by which memories persist in the brain, and how they can be modified after their initial storage, at retrieval, through a process known as 'memory reconsolidation'. She is especially interested in how disrupting memories might be used to treat psychiatric disorders such as drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder; a topic that she began researching during her PhD studies, in the lab of Professor Barry Everitt. Her work has been published in journals such as The Journal of Neuroscience, Learning & Memory, and the European Journal of Neuroscience, and her work on disrupting drug memories in addiction was featured on Channel 4 News and in Scientific American. After she completed her PhD she became a Research Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, before taking up a lectureship in the Department of Experimental Psychology in 2008.

Dr Jon Simons

Jon Simons is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a research programme seeking to understand the brain regions involved in human memory. After studying Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, he undertook a PhD at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge before moving to the United States, to a post-doctoral position at Harvard University.  On returning to the UK, he took up a senior research fellowship at University College London, followed by a move back to Cambridge, where he is now principal investigator in the Memory Laboratory at the Department of Experimental Psychology. The laboratory's research is currently funded by the BBSRC, and through affiliation with the University of Cambridge Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, supported by a joint award from the MRC and the Wellcome Trust. Dr Simons' work has been recognised with the 19th Experimental Psychology Society Prize and the Memory Disorders Research Society Laird Cermak Award.