Birkbeck academic awarded 2025 British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

Dr Daniel Yon, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, has been announced as a recipient of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, having been awarded a grant of £140,796 to work on a new book about the psychology and neuroscience of the imagination.

Dr Daniel Yon commented: “Imagination is at the heart of our distinctively human lives. But psychology and neuroscience suggest that we may need to reassess how we think imagination works. In this project, the plan is to combine my experience as a scientist and an author to weave together the latest scientific perspectives on imagination. The result will be a popular non-fiction book that reveals the implications that new theories and results have for human memory, morality, creativity, decision making; and how we imagine our personal futures and the future of humanity as a whole.”

The Mid-Career Fellowships are designed both to support outstanding individual researchers with excellent research proposals, and to promote public understanding and engagement with humanities and social sciences. The awards are intended primarily to provide opportunities for researchers who have already made an outstanding contribution to their field and have achieved distinction as an excellent communicator and ‘champion’ in their field.

Dr Yon studied Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford before moving to Birkbeck for an MSc and PhD in 2013. He received his doctorate in 2018, and took up a lectureship at Goldsmiths before rejoining Birkbeck as a member of the Psychology faculty in 2021. Dr Yon has held Visiting Fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study, Paris, and All Souls College, University of Oxford – and in June 2025 he published his first book, A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality.