Thursday 1 December 2011

Why Jon Driver was an inspiration to me

Jon Driver studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford before taking up a University Lectureship at Cambridge.  Within eight years of obtaining his DPhil doctoral degree he was a Professor at Birkbeck, and from 1998 a Professor at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), one of the world’s leading centres of research into the brain basis of cognition.  He was Director of the ICN from 2004-2009, before being one of a small handful of researchers from all across the sciences to be selected for a prestigious Royal Society Anniversary Research Professorship in 2009.  He died this week, tragically young at the age of 49, leaving a young family.

I never worked with Jon directly, and wouldn’t say that I knew him particularly well.  More comprehensive and better informed assessments of his life and career will no doubt be found elsewhere.  However, the times I did spend with Jon were sufficient to leave a lasting impression on me, which is what I wanted to reflect on in these brief thoughts.