Eleanor A. Maguire

Type: collaborator Slug: collaborator—eleanor-maguire Sources: deconstructing-episodic-memory-with-construction—hassabis, patients-with-hippocampal-amnesia-cannot-imagine-new-experiences—hassabis, the-construction-system-of-the-brain—hassabis, using-imagination-to-understand-the-neural-basis-of-episodic-memory—hassabis, imagine-all-the-people-how-the-brain-creates-and-uses-personality-models—hassabis, decoding-neuronal-ensembles-in-the-human-hippocampus—hassabis Last updated: 2026-05-13

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Summary

Eleanor A. Maguire was Hassabis’s PhD supervisor at UCL’s Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging and co-author on 6 corpus papers (2007–2009). She is the most frequent collaborator in the corpus and the primary scientific partner during the hippocampal construction programme.

Role

PhD supervisor. Provided the experimental infrastructure (fMRI access, patient contacts, epilepsy surgery collaborations) and the broader programme context (memory research tradition). Senior author on all 6 joint papers.

Papers together

1. Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences (2007)
2. Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory (2007)
3. Deconstructing episodic memory with construction (2007, BBS target article)
4. Imagine all the people (2008)
5. Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus (2009)
6. The construction system of the brain (2009)

Connections

• Project: project—hippocampus-research
• Period: period—phd-period
• Theme: theme—hippocampal-construction, theme—memory-imagination

Honest Gaps

• No source describes the supervision relationship from either party’s perspective.
• Maguire’s own research programme (taxi driver studies, spatial memory) is not represented in the corpus.
• No information on how the construction hypothesis originated — whether Hassabis proposed it or Maguire shaped it.