Dr Pablo Fernandez Velasco
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Profile

Biography

I joined the department in 2023 as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. Before that, I did my PhD at the Institut Jean Nicod of Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and I was an IRC postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin. I am also an affiliated member of the Spiers lab of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience in UCL. I have published academic articles in top journals across a variety of disciplines, and my work has received media attention in venues including BBC, The Guardian, Irish Times, Le Monde, and New Scientist. In 2022, I was awarded the Annual Essay Prize from the Antwerp Centre for Philosophical Psychology.

Research

Overview

I am particularly interested in spatial cognition, environmental experience, and the role that affective processes play in evaluating and regulating cognition. I explore all of these themes in collaboration with researchers across neuroscience, computer science, psychology, geography, anthropology and architecture. This interdisciplinary ethos is reflected in the diverse methodologies involved in my work, which span phenomenology, cognitive ethnography, brain imaging, gamified experiments, survey instruments and thematic analysis.

Projects

For my British Academy project, I will be exploring ecological grief, the sense of loss that arises from experiencing environmental destruction. The plan is to combine phenomenological methods with recent advances in the cognitive sciences to develop an integrative theory of ecological grief that serves as the basis of future interdisciplinary research into the psychological effects of environmental destruction.

Teaching

Other teaching

Most of my teaching has been in philosophy of mind and phenomenology. Outside of philosophy, I have taught in psychology and geography departments and in architecture schools, on topics such as behavioural neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

Dr Pablo Fernandez Velasco British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow