Eleanor Maguire

Today, I watched the video "The Neuroscience of Memory" by Eleanor Maguire and, while exploring her work on memory, I learned of her passing.
A profound loss for all who are curious about the wonders of the human brain. May her groundbreaking contributions continue to inspire generations, and may her legacy shine brightly in the field of neuroscience.

Eleanor Maguire’s passing is a great loss to neuroscience. Her research on the hippocampus and memory has shaped much of what we know today.

I am from Turkey, and I had the privilege of exchanging emails with her last year about the episodic memory dataset she shared, which later became part of my research. Her quick and thoughtful response showed her dedication to the scientific community. I had hoped to collaborate with her further, perhaps even under her guidance for my PhD thesis.

Her work will continue to inspire researchers for years to come. Rest in peace, Professor Maguire.

I didn’t know Ellenor but having listened to an RTE programme today, I would like to pass on my condolences. I heard she was a Palace fan and I share that at least with her. RIP

I feel so sad that we have lost Eleanor. She was a brilliant scientist, gave wise advice and had a dry wit that made me laugh. She was also a very kind person. I have been looking back at our email correspondence over the past two decades, and found dozens of emails from Eleanor sending me supportive messages out of the blue. She didn't have to do this, but she did. I miss her a lot. The world has lost a star.

An award scheme has been set up in Eleanor Maguire's memory at the Memory Disorders Research Society, of which Eleanor and I were both active members. Happy for individuals to contact me if they wish to make a donation – n.kapur@ucl.ac.uk

I will always remember you, sitted in the corner of the front room at the fil. Your eyes on the screen, your mind in action … and then as by magic you would turn around with a smile or a gentle word. I do not know how you could be so solid and determinated in what you did as well as so sociable and funny.
Science lost a great persons and we humans too 😔

Eleanor was an outstanding scientist who contributed to the study of memory with audacious and innovating ideas and provided fundamental new knowledge. I had the chance to have several scientific encounters with her and I invited her to talk at the College de France in Paris. Her premature loss is dreadfull. We will miss her deply. I wish to send my condoleances to her familly.
Alain

For those who would like to listen to this beautiful Farewell song by the outstanding Irish singer Daniel O'Donnell, the link is below. The song is in harmony with the special music that was played at Eleanor's funeral on January 25, 2025.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7E7DsnvSNo&list=PLEgWGABkPxxrmRwBWeTsZtRdSh0fzcIGT&index=11

Very sad to hear this. I had the good fortune to collaborate with Eleanor about 25 years ago. It was such a privilege and pleasure to work with her - she was truly inspirational. My sincere condolences to her family and friends.

I hope my last goodbye & thank you Gmail message sent was seen by my first cousin Eleanor. I always was & will be proud to boast about the contributions made to science, especially "The Knowledge" experiment and awards received over the years. I will always be grateful for helping me through my research studies module and advice for creating my basic experimental design during my education at DCU. My heart is broken for my dearest auntie and uncle Anne & Paddy. Rest in peace E, Love Stephen.

We are saddened by the passing of Eleonor, our faithful and loved customer, we will always remember ❤️ you as our friend , Rest in peace. Our sincere condolences to the family. From Castiel's

I am heart broken to hear of Eleanor’s passing. She was a wonderful lady and a true pioneer in her field. I send my thoughts and prayers to her family in Ireland and all her friends and colleagues. RIP Eleanor.

Very saddening news to hear of the passing of Eleanor. I knew her from the beginning of the FIL as PhD student. From the start she had an amazing personality and interacted well with all her colleagues, meeting her a few years ago was a delight and privilege I know she will be sadly missed . My sincere condolences to her family RIP

I have just had a photo of Eleanor flash up on my computer screen - then disappear. Going online to try to recover it led me to this page. The sad news has taken my breath away, especially as I have for some time intended to contact her with a view to passing over a framed photograph in my possession of Eleanor and her fellow M.Sc. students at Swansea where she was one of my students. I hope others will not be offended if I say she was the star student - easily the most accomplished of all the students I have had the pleasure of teaching over the years before I retired. Not only that, but she was a delightful person to know. Modest and retiring, she hid her light under a bushel, but with an impish sense of humour and a ready smile. My deepest condolences go out to her family and friends.

Eleanor's passing is a great loss to science, to the field, and to the FIL. She was a great scientist, and a driving force for many of technological advances that continue to shape the department. Eleanor had a big heart, and one of our first closer interactions was when Professor Maguire casually and kindly invited me, then a junior post doc from the same department lost at a huge conference, to join her team for their dinner. It is impressive how she continued to pursue her science to the last moments. My heartfelt condolences to her family and colleagues.

What a bitter blow! Eleanor was a brilliant scientist, towering in the field of neuroscience despite her diminutive height! We were elected together to the Royal Society in 2016 and I will never forget her brilliant talk at the New Fellows seminar which started with a story about her aunt Mary ... She was so authoritative, so self deprecating and so utterly unforgettable. She was also so very stoic when we were in touch in 2023...

Her loss is a tragedy for her lovely parents whom I met, her family, colleagues, UCL, and many generations of students who would have benefited from her brilliance! And we must never forget that it was her work which first identified the change to the structure of hippocampus in taxi drivers (which was not acknowledged in recent media reports): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597...

Such a tragedy...

I am deeply saddened by this tragic loss. I will always remember Elena's kind and warm personality and her quiet scientific super-strength from when our paths crossed during these wonderful times at the FIL in 1995-1996. Elena's research was of great clinical significance. My sincere condolences to her family, friends and colleagues at the FIL.

Eleanor’s early studies on the neuroscience of superior memory have been very influential in developing my passion and ideas for investigating the neuronal correlates of outstanding memory performances, as demonstrated by memory athletes.

I always enjoyed meeting her at conferences and gained many ideas from our conversations. I am very saddened to hear about her passing.

My sincere condolences to everyone close to Eleanor; we will miss her but will never forget her.

I was deeply saddened to hear such heartbreaking news. I had the privilege to meet Eleanor at the FIL when I was working in the Language Group (under the leadership of Cathy Price) between 2006 and 2015. She was truly an amazing person, and her absence will be profoundly felt by all who knew her. Eleanor left behind an incredible legacy, including a widely recognized work on the hippocampus of taxi drivers and being the mentor of the 2024 Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis.
Condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues.

I did my PhD at the ICN and FIL from 2009-14. Despite the brilliant project presentations by Eleanor's group, I didn't grasp the full extent of her fame as a neuroscientist until one curious night I stayed at work late. When I cycled home, I stopped somewhere in northeast London to ask a drunk and homeless man who had cut his hand with a bottle if he needed help. He didn't, but was more than happy to talk. When he asked what I was doing (PhD in neuroscience) he chimed in: 'But did you know that cabbies brains grow when they learn the map?!'

I wasn't part of Eleanor's lab when I was a postdoc at the FIl, but her warmth made it easy for me to look up to her. More recently, after I became a PI, I had the honor of working with her on a grant proposal. Her generosity and support made this collaborative process so enjoyable and rewarding (although we didn't get the grant in the end). RIP Eleanor. You will be missed and your ideas will inspire so many of us to carry on with our scientific work.

As my PhD supervisor, Eleanor played an incredibly important role in my life that has shaped my career ever since. She was a great scientist and bold visionary, never shying away from exploring the novel frontiers of memory research. But more than this, she was a great person who deeply cared for her team. I was lucky to launch start my academic career in her lab and I will miss her.

I have struggled to write a coherent narrative that captures how my genuine memories of Eleanor. The best I can do is provide some disconnected memories and impressions of Eleanor that have stayed with me for over a decade, reconstructed often, but never distorted.

A skeptical face pulled in research talks whenever Eleanor did not agree with what was being said. It was very easy to get a direct training signal from her during lab talks!

A great sense of humour, often on display with a somewhat wicked twinkle in her eye.

An occasional propensity to fierceness, particularly in defense of her team.

A great intellect, without any superficial intellectual pretensions.

Eleanor, perhaps more than anyone I've worked with, always encouraged me to think bigger than I was. This started before I even joined the FIL, when she was on the interview panel for my postdoc with Gareth Barnes. I remember coming out of there not wondering whether I had got the job, but when could I go head-to-head again like that.

Sadly due to COVID, and the crossover between that and Eleanor's illness meant, most of my interactions afterwards that were over Teams and email. However even that remote world, the ecouragement to get the best out of us to enable FILbury to become a reality was still present all the way through. Her judge of character meant that I got to work alongside some of her incredible hires, friends I hope to keep for life.

Eleanor, thank you for making me so welcome in the FIL at what was such a strange and stressful time for everyone. I'm so sorry we couldn't wait for it to all blow over. Rest easy,

As so many others have already stated, Eleanor was truly one of a kind.

Although I was never part of Eleanor’s team, I was extremely fortunate to count Eleanor as a mentor and collaborator. United by our interest in memory disorders, Eleanor was nothing but generous with her time, her ideas, and her encouragement. Any time our paths overlapped at a conference, or if I passed through London, we would meet, have lunch (or a hot chocolate!) and chat about research, academia, and life more generally. I greatly admired her fierce intellect, her commitment to producing research of the highest quality, and her impossibly clever research paradigms. It also helped that she possessed a wicked sense of humour and never seemed to take herself too seriously.

We had been in touch only recently, as Eleanor had invited me to examine the PhD thesis of one of her students. True to form, the thesis was exceptional and conveyed the same rigour and elegance that was the signature of Eleanor’s career. She expressed her determination to keep going as long as she could and even made tentative plans for us to meet in London in February. Sadly, this was not to be.

My sincere condolences to Eleanor’s family and her many friends and colleagues around the world.

Suaimhneas síoraí dá hanam,
Muireann Irish.

What a terrible loss. I got to know Eleanor during my postdoc years on Queen Square. We did not work together directly although I will always remember that one paper on which I was coauthor for the fastest review process I ever experienced... More importantly, I will remember her great insights in Brain Meetings and the creative studies in the FIL project presentations. And I also vaguely recall something with a magician at a Christmas party.

My deepest condolences to her loved ones.

RIP Eleanor. Your study was a source of immense inspiration for me and for all neurologist and neuroscience community.
She will be missed.
Condolences to her family and loved ones

RIP Eleanor. I am a huge fan of your amazing body of work. Your contribution to neuroscience is utterly fascinating. Sending heartfelt condolences to your family.

I was very sad to learn that Professor Eleanor Maguire died at such a young age. She had so much more to contribute to science. Her work was a source of immense inspiration for me, especially during my PhD research on spatial memory in stroke, where her publications were both enlightening and transformative. Prof. Maguire’s brilliance, passion, and dedication to advancing knowledge will be profoundly missed. Rest in peace, Professor Maguire; your legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.

Thanks for all the support you've made to psychology investigations.

This is truly sad news. May Eleanor's soul rest in peace. She leaves behind an enduring legacy. Her groundbreaking study of London taxi drivers profoundly inspired my interest in neuroplasticity in the early 2000's. I pray her family, friends and colleagues draw comfort from her impact on memory and neuroscience.

Eleanor’s passing at such a relatively young age (54 yrs) was tragic, and sadly mirrors some of the other tragic losses we have had of leading memory researchers/MDRS members at such a young age (Alan Parkin, 49 yrs; Justine Sergent, 44 yrs; Nelson Butters, 58 yrs; Laird Cermak, 57 yrs). I was fortunate to have known Eleanor from the time she started her job in London in the 1990s, and to have published a joint paper with her. Her talents were outstanding, and she even produced a paper close to my heart (paradoxical functional facilitation in amnesia). She is probably the only memory researcher to have a PhD student who then went on to win a Nobel Prize (Dennis Hassabis), and she published at least seven joint papers with the Nobel Laureate, John O’Keefe. Eleanor has left behind an amazing legacy, both in terms of the many researchers she trained and also resources such as the invaluable open-access imaging/neuropsych database which she recently created. I was privileged to be able to visit her around half a dozen times when she was in hospital, and I admired the courage and grace that she showed during that period. It seems that she sadly died not of the original cancer, but perhaps of the side-effects of the treatment, and if so, I hope that lessons can be learned from her death. May she rest in peace. Narinder Kapur.

I offer my sincere condolences to her family, her loved ones and the scientific community. May she rest in peace,God bless .

Passing of Eleanor is an immense loss for the FIL and global neuroscience community. During my time at the FIL as an MRI physicist, I had the privilege of collaborating with Eleanor and her team on her groundbreaking 7T fMRI studies. Her brilliance, dedication, and inspiring intellect made working with her a truly enriching experience. May her soul rest in peace.

Thank you for being a beacon in our world. Your legacy lives on. Though it's painful to know you are gone to rest, we take solace in
the grace of God our strength 🙏

Great to know about her inspirational work on Neuroplasticity.
Condolences to her family well wishers and colleagues.

Thank you for contributing so much to the neuroscience community. I have read and taught your research studies to my students.

Eleanor's passing is a tremendous loss. I first met her when I was a master's student, which eventually led me to pursue a PhD under her guidance. This experience was truly exceptional. Eleanor was a kind and generous mentor, and I feel fortunate to have worked with a scientist who held high standards for the quality of research conducted in her lab. Her clarity of thought and innovative approach were inspiring. She also had a wonderful sense of humour and loved hearing stories about my mishaps with taxi driver recruitment, often responding with a cheeky smile.

On a personal level, Eleanor was warm and compassionate. During my last visit, although she was very unwell, she showed genuine interest in my personal and professional life. Her strength and dedication to her work during this challenging time in her life are truly admirable.

She will be missed.

Je présente tout mes sincères condoléances a ça famille ces proches et la communauté scientifique. Quelle repose en paix nchallah

A true loss to the field. She was a giant and her work was definitional. Among the many contributions she made, her work on the role of hippocampal lesions and imagination were critical to how my own lab started to think about decision making and the mechanisms that underlie it. I will miss talking to her at conferences and visits to UCL. Those conversations were always important and insightful and I often left thinking about things differently.

I am truly saddened by Eleanor's passing, which came relatively suddenly such that I was unable to say a final goodbye. I consider myself very fortunate to have been Eleanor's PhD student - and her first one at that. She introduced me to the fascinating world of memory, and inspired me with her creativity and big picture thinking. I will always be grateful for her support in my wish to employ more laboratory style tests of memory even though this diverged so strongly with her firm belief in the importance of examining memory in a more real world context.

For such a small person, Eleanor had a mighty intellect, a towering reputation and a large amount of resilience - something that greatly helped me to survive my initial experience with scientific publishing: when our first paper together did the "journal cascade" being rejected from around 6 places before being finally accepted. I think without her optimistic attitude I would have been utterly dejected.

I will greatly miss Eleanor. My time at the FIL in her fledging lab with Demis, Hugo and others was the best academic and simply the most fun experience of my working life - we fondly remember it as the "golden era". I will miss our impromptu chats even after I left her lab, and even those when she was already very sick. I am happy though that her scientific legacy will live on, and her work will continue to shape the direction of memory research (and beyond) and inspire new generations of researchers. Goodbye Eleanor, we will never forget you.

Dharshan Kumaran

My condolences and acknowledgement that her research proved that London taxi drivers have more developed brain sections than average humans.

I was amazed to learn the work Eleanor contributed in the field of neuroscience. Such a remarkable and intelligent human being. May her soul rest in peace.

Tough times never last... Eleanor was a beauty to the neuroscience communityt.

I first got to know Eleanor in 2007, as a PhD student at the FIL starting out in cognitive neuroscience. From the very beginning, it was clear to me that Eleanor was a role model to follow closely, to learn from, and to seek to emulate. She had an unwavering commitment to her chosen field of memory research, and her drive, focus and scientific creativity enabled her to obtain wonderful insights into the nexus of brain and mind.

After I returned to the FIL as a new PI in 2015, I took up residence in an office next to hers. This was in equal parts intimidating and lovely, lending me the privilege of regular hallway catch-ups and the benefit of her occasional words of advice, warning or encouragement – words which carried considerable weight, and still ring in my ears today. More generally, Eleanor was a champion of early career researchers, always quick to congratulate or commiserate with people in those rollercoaster early stages of fellowship wins and losses.

Eleanor had the very highest standards for her science, and the care with which she treated both experimental design and neuroanatomy was an inspiration. She extended those high standards to the wider FIL – ensuring that a focus on rigor in experimental design was never lost, even when new technologies (which she embraced and often pioneered) came on the scene.

I was lucky to spend some time with her through her awful illness, which she faced with remarkable stoicism. True to form, she remained engaged and committed to her science and to the FIL until the very end. In our last conversation just before Christmas we had energetic debates about the relative balance of cognitive and systems neuroscience research for the future of the field. She welcomed new initiatives to bridge these silos – but also urged me not to lose sight of all that still needs to be done to understand how the human brain supports the richness of our mental lives. She was right of course – and by pursuing this kind of work, we will be honouring her memory.

I have often thought that a good strategy for a career in science is to seek the respect of those you respect, and the rest will take care of itself. For me, Eleanor was one of those scientists whose standards I have sought to emulate and to live up to. The memories of her advice and encouragement will no doubt sustain many of us long into the future.

I will miss her greatly.

I am currently studying psychology at an A-Level and I would love to show appreciation to the research you have contributed to psychology and neuroscience you will surely be missed.

So sad to hear this news and my condolences to Eleanor’s family, friends, colleagues and students. I was lucky enough to know Eleanor in the late 1990s at the FIL. I remember her tremendous integrity, both personal and scientific, her wonderful humour and bone-dry wit, and her deep, instinctive, unshowy generosity.

Since those early days, I’ve followed Eleanor’s outstanding scientific career with huge admiration. Reading the tributes here, it’s also abundantly clear how many other amazing scientists she has mentored and inspired over the years, and I have no doubt her memory will live on through their work.

Very sad to hear this news. Eleanor was not only a brilliant scientist, she was a much-admired teacher, tutor, mentor and supervisor. I remember how she generously contributed to the 'new' MSc in Clinical Neuroscience at QSIoN (we only had one MSc programme back in the day). She has inspired countless colleagues and students. This is a great loss.

I knew and admired Eleanor's work from my undergrad days. When I then got to work in the Centre where she was a PI, I was equally excited and intimidated. Over the last 10 years, I was privileged to get to know her better as a colleague and on a personal level. What always stood out to me was her passion for her work and to enable people at the FIL to thrive. Even if we disagreed about the direction occasionally, it was always clear that she only wanted what was best for the Centre. And her passion shaped the FIL and the lives of many of us, which gives me comfort in knowing that her lasting impact will not be forgotten. I will also always remember her (dry) humour. She was a great and witty conversation partner with whom it was easy to chat away for a long time over a drink at the FIL parties. Eleanor will be dearly missed at the FIL and she will leave behind a big gap in our community.

I feel very lucky to have known Eleanor. Eleanor was a giant scientifically, but she also struck me for a different reason. One of my students, Flavia De Luca, was about to go to her lab for a year as a visiting. Eleanor barely knew us, but I was impressed by how she took care of every single little aspect of the visit to ensure Flavia would get the most out of it. She was very generous and caring. Collaborating with her on some projects was pure joy; I smiled when I read her additions to our papers. I recently broke my legs. She was already ill, but she always continued to write me words of encouragement. Even then her words were so magical and effective that each time I felt like I could run again.
My condolences to the family on the loss of such a special person

Rest in Peace Eleanor, may your memory be a blessing to your loved ones, you have impacted people’s lives and you will not be forgotten.

What an immensely sad act it is to write these words to commemorate Eleanor and reflect on what she meant to each of us. To her dear parents, friends and colleagues, I extend my deepest sympathy.

I first met Eleanor in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, she was writing her PhD and I was completing training in clinical psychology. Our mutual area of interest was epilepsy and we published a paper on self-esteem in children following surgery for epilepsy. I was impressed then by her dedication, eye for detail and care for patients. Her wry observations (scientific and social) were often delivered with a glint in the eye and accompanied by wonder or hilarity; sometimes both.

I was one of her ‘controls’ in her Blackrock study, a forerunner to the London Taxi Driver research. I recall being humbled by my appalling performance on location recall, but also more importantly I recalled the clever design of her study and the efforts she went made to achieve this.

If I have one small claim to fame, it is that when I worked in London, I informed Eleanor about the post at FIL and that I thought it would suit her perfectly. In true Eleanor style, she was thorough in her analysis of the details and prospects of the post, and after careful consideration, she made the best decision by far. From there, she blossomed and reached the greatest academic heights always maintaining her core values of excellence and integrity.

We kept in touch over the years; her Christmas card was always the first to arrive. I attended her presentation following admission to the RIA, she was glorious in her confidence as she described her ideas and work. I recall feeling enormous pride for her and her parents.

May you rest in peace Eleanor; you have contributed so much with great humility and care, we are greatly privileged and enriched to have known you.

Thank you for your significant contribution, Eleanor! May you rest in peace 🤍

It still doesn't seem real or fair that Eleanor has been taken away from us far too soon, and still in her prime with so many plans unfinished. My time spent in Eleanor's lab alongside Dharsh, Hugo, Katya et al were some of the most formative, productive, and just plain fun years of my career. It's where I really learnt to do deep rigorous research, and how it differed from the engineering disciplines I was used to. On one recent visit to the hospital we were fondly reminiscing of those halcyon days at the FIL in its golden age, and the intense but good humoured debates we used to have at lab meetings - she was always super supportive of creative (and even downright outlandish!) ideas, as long as they were big ones! Eleanor will be greatly missed by all who knew her, but she will always be a towering figure in the field of hippocampus and memory research, and her legacy will live on through the pioneering work she did and the many people she inspired.

I had an aim of becoming an astrophysicist when I was young. The inevitability of BCIs brought me to the field of neurosciences and cognitive sciences.

But, in the very first month of my Master's, there was a time when I considered switching back to Physics, as neuroscience seemed to be in a very nascent stage. It was at that moment, that I discovered Prof. Maguire's work on London taxi drivers' hippocampus. The proof of adult neurogenesis, and the possibility of replicating it in other regions of the brain is something which motivated me, and gave me a hope that we can learn a lot about the brain, despite the humongous physical and technological limitations in observing our brains.

Your work played a crucial role in shaping my career trajectory. Thank you Professor! You will be missed.

To a psychologist whom I personally did not have the opportunity to meet but whose contributions I shared with countless students in order to unravel the understanding of human memory.
Very grateful for everything Ms. Maguire and I will always have you in my memory.

An inspiration and legend to so many. We are all richer for her contribution to research and our lives.
Thank you x

It was the spring of 2004 in a seminar room in Edinburgh as an undergraduate when Richard Morris had us read a PNAS paper from a couple of years earlier that he was always very excited about. Well, how inconsequential that seminar felt 20 years ago, but how it shaped almost the entirety of my adult life.

I won't add commentary to the scientific achievements, which stand for themselves, and I take those lessons with me into clinics and ward. That science has spoken to patients struggling to understand their own experiences.

What remains is her personality and nature. I asked her once why she supported Crystal Palace and she just replied that it sounded magical and regal growing up. That was reason enough and I respected her more for its innocence and honesty. But, as with many people and things, she stuck with them with singular focus.

And, I never did find out what was in those taxi bags you gave all the patients. I like that I never will - very Eleanor to leave us with a bit of mystery.

🙏🙏

Thank you for the knowledge. My students and I greatly appreciate what you left us.

I 'll never look at london taxi drivers the same way again thanks to you!One of the favourite studies of my psychology students!Thank you for all you did for Science and Psychology!