Professor Hugo Spiers is the Vice Dean for Innovation and Enterprise in the Faculty of Brain Sciences, UCL. He has over 25 years of research experience in neuroscience and psychology. He gained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, conducted research at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging before establishing his own research team in the Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL. He now employs cognitive and behavioural neuroscience techniques to study the neural basis of spatial cognition and memory. In 2016 he launched the Sea Hero Quest project which has tested over 4 million people world wide on their spatial navigation abilities.
Hugo Spiers is director of the Spatial Cognition Laboratory at UCL. His research team study how our brain constructs representations of the world and uses them to navigate, imagine the future and remember the past. The research group are based in the UCL Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and use brain imaging, neuropsychological testing, virtual reality, eye-tracking and single cell recording as methods to understand brain function and spatial cognition.