Two Birkbeck academics awarded British Academy Mid-Career Fellowships

Dr Daniel Yon, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience, and Dr Benedetta Crisafulli, Reader in Marketing, have been announced as recipients of a British Academy 2025 Mid-Career Fellowship.

Dr Daniel Yon was awarded a grant of £140,796 to work on a new book about the psychology and neuroscience of the imagination.

Dr 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.”

Dr Benedetta Crisafulli was awarded a grant of £137,381 to provide the first ever shortform book combining scholarly evidence on persuasion in the era of social media influencers with practice-based insights from interviewing teachers and charities working on online safety. A programme of public engagement and dissemination activities will foster dialogue between academia, teachers and charities to advance a co-produced, user-centred approach to online safety that can guide users in recognising and resisting influencers' manipulative content.

Dr Crisafulli said: “I am truly honoured to have been awarded this prestigious Fellowship, and I am very excited to carry out this project and to make societal impact.”

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.

Dr Crisafulli joined Birkbeck in July 2018 from Cranfield University where she was Lecturer in Marketing. She is a consumer expert whose research focuses on the psychology of persuasion via crisis communications, influencer marketing and emotional appeals. Her research has previously been awarded funding from the British Academy/Wellcome Small Grant and the Marketing Trust. She has published several articles in high-quality journals, and is currently guest editor of a special issue on “Dilemmas in consumers' use of AI” at Psychology & Marketing. Benedetta studied in Italy, Germany and UK, where she worked in the private sector and completed her doctoral studies. Her doctoral thesis won the 2016 EDAMBA (European Doctoral Association in Management and Business Administration) thesis competition award.