Karalyn Patterson

Karalyn Patterson is an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge; a visiting researcher at the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge; a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the British Academy; and Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Her educational background is in experimental psychology and neuropsychology, with degrees from the Universities of Toronto (Canada), Michigan and California (USA), and Cambridge (UK). Her research concentrates on what we can learn about the organization and neural representation of language and memory from the study of neurological patients whose cognitive abilities were in the normal range until the onset of brain disease or damage in adulthood. This research program includes cognitive assessments of people with different disorders, to obtain detailed patterns of processes that are impaired and those that are still relatively preserved, combined with structural and functional brain imaging to reveal malfunctioning brain regions. During a number of visiting-researcher periods in Tokyo, Karalyn has also had the opportunity to study and compare the impact of the same brain disorders on two very different languages, English and Japanese.

About Dorothy:

"Colleagues occasionally ask me what it was like to work at the MRC-CBU Cambridge, or what was special about it during the years that it was my professional home. Of course, there are many possible answers, because it was and is a wonderful privilege to be a researcher there. But no-one wants a list in reply to a simple question, so here is my simple answer: I had the office next to Dorothy Bishop’s.