Professor Elizabeth Jefferies FBA

Summary

Professor Beth Jefferies is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research investigates the neural basis of memory, semantic cognition, and language. She completed a BA in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a PhD in Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. She then held a Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester, where she examined language and semantic impairments in people with stroke and dementia. In 2025, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge from the British Psychological Society, and the Mid-Career Award from the Experimental Psychology Society.

Now based at the University of York, Professor Jefferies leads research on the large-scale brain networks that support flexible, memory-guided thought. Her work combines patient studies with multimodal neuroimaging—including functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, and transcranial magnetic stimulation—to understand how we retrieve context-relevant meanings for words and concepts, and how this capacity is affected by brain injury. These methods are also used to understand how we shift between externally focused tasks and internally generated states, such as mind-wandering, to support adaptive cognition.