New members

We are happy to welcome Professor Asifa Majid and Professor Ralph Schneider to the SapienCE Scientific Advisory Committee in 2019.

Majid is a leading expert on the influences of language and culture on cognition. Having earned her PhD in psychology at the University of Glasgow, she moved to the Netherlands in 2001 as a Marie Curie Fellow, and later became a Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, as well as Affiliated Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University. Equipped with an NWO VICI grant (of €1.5 million) to study olfactory language and cognition across diverse cultures, she became a Professor at the Center for Language Studies at Radboud University. In 2018, she moved to the University of York to become a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology. In recognition of her sustained outstanding contributions to psychology and linguistics, she was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of The Academy of Europe (Linguistics Section), and she is the present chair of the Cognitive Science Society. With her unique expertise, Majid will reinforce the Centre’s activities focused on cognition and symbolic behaviour. Schneider is a leading expert on paleoclimate and has worked extensively on past land-ocean interactions in Africa. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Bremen, he worked as a research assistant in marine geology and paleoclimate research at the Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) in Bremen. In 2003 he was appointed as a Professor in Palaeoceanography at Bordeaux University, France and moved to Kiel in 2005 were he was appointed as a Professor in Marine Geology and Paleoclimate Research. Since 2009, he is also Scientific Director of the Leibniz Laboratory for Radiocarbon Dating and Isotope Research. Schneider has held central positions in international research programmes and in the leadership of Centres of Excellence at Kiel University. Schneider’s appointment to the Scientific Advisory Committee will help guide the climate activities of the Centre.