Professor Jon Simons
BSc (Aberdeen), PhD, FRSB
Official Fellow; Director of Studies in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience; Head of the School of Biological Sciences
Jon Simons studied Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, where he became particularly interested in the field of neuropsychology, which aims to understand psychological processes by examining how they become dysfunctional in people with brain injury or neurological illness. This interest brought him to Cambridge, where he undertook a PhD at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Chaucer Road investigating patterns of memory impairment and preservation in different forms of dementia.
Having established an enduring research interest in human memory, Jon moved to a post-doctoral position at Harvard University where he gained experience using functional neuroimaging to identify areas of the brain that are active during different stages of the retrieval of information from memory. On returning to the UK, he took up a senior research fellowship at UCL before moving back to Cambridge, where he is now principal investigator in the Memory Laboratory at the Department of Psychology. Jon's work has been recognised with the 19th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award, the Memory Disorders Research Society Laird Cermak Award, and Fellowship of the Royal Society of Biology and the Association for Psychological Science.
In 2025, Jon was appointed Head of the School of Biological Sciences following five years as Deputy Head. In his current role he has overall responsibility for implementation of the School's academic vision surrounding research strategy, undergraduate teaching and postgraduate education. He chairs the Council of the School and is a member of the University's senior leadership team and numerous University committees.
Further details about Jon's research can be found at the Memory Laboratory page.