Dr Chris Bird, Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Chris Bird, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, has been awarded almost two million Euros, or £1.7 million, for his research into memory by the European Research Council (ERC).

With the funds, Dr Bird will develop his research which looks at how humans understand the world in which we live, and then recall it as memory. 

The funding is awarded to mid-career researchers undertaking “daring” and “ambitious” work.

Dr Bird will also be collaborating with Sussex colleagues in the School of Informatics as well as recruiting new postdoctoral researchers to work on the project.

Dr Bird, Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, said: “With this grant we’ll look at how we carve up continuous experience into coherent events that we can remember later.

“During our waking lives we are continuously exposed to a vast amount of information about the world around us. Yet somehow we make sense of this information and we consciously experience a meaningful and ordered world, where life proceeds in a sequence of events with recognisable beginnings and ends.

"At the moment, we know very little about how the human mind manages to re-package continuous experience into coherent events, and how it is able to reactivate them later in order to remember the event.

“The Consolidator Grant will enable me to address these issues, using videos to simulate real-world experience and functional MRI scanning to identify how these processes are carried out by the brain. I’ll be testing both healthy adults and patients with memory problems caused by neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and encephalitis.

"I will also collaborate with Anil Seth, Warrick Roseboom and Christopher Buckley in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex to develop a computational model that is able to identify, store and retrieve events shown in videos.”

The President of the ERC, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, commented:

"This ERC funding will allow ambitious scientists to establish or strengthen their teams in Europe and be truly creative in their research. Beyond a push to the grantees’ careers, this European support will offer an excellent working environment for younger researchers at doctoral and post-doctoral levels. We look forward to see many of these daring ideas come to fruition, to the benefit of Europe at large."

The ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers of any nationality and age, with at least seven and up to 12 years of experience after PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise. The funding (average of €2 million per grant), is provided for up to five years and mostly covers the employment of researchers and other staff to consolidate the grantees' teams.

The other projects awarded grants include those looking at beetle compasses, wage inequality, metasurfaces and multi-limbed robots. The ERC has announced that it has awarded Consolidator Grants to 291 top scientists across Europe. Funding for these researchers is worth €573 million and will give them a chance to build up their teams and have far-reaching impact.

The grantees will carry out their projects at universities and research centres in 21 different countries across Europe, with the United Kingdom (55 grants), Germany (38), France (32) and Switzerland (29) as leading locations.