19 Facts About Jon Driver

Jonathon Stevens "Jon Driver" was a psychologist and neuroscientist.

Jon Driver was a leading figure in the study of perception, selective attention and multisensory integration in the normal and damaged human brain.

Jon Driver studied at The Queen's College, Oxford and received a First Class degree in Experimental Psychology in 1984.

Jon Driver then stayed on at Oxford for his DPhil, under the supervision of Alan Allport and Peter McLeod.

From 2009 Jon Driver held a Royal Society Anniversary Research Professorship, which allowed him to concentrate on research.

Jon Driver was a principal investigator at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL.

In 2005 Jon Driver was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences; in 2006 as a member of Academia Europaea, the Academy of Europe; and in 2008 as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Jon Driver received many prestigious awards during his career, including the Spearman Medal of the British Psychological Society, the Experimental Psychology Society Prize, and the EPS Mid-Career Award.

Jon Driver was awarded a Royal Society-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

From 2009, Jon Driver held a Royal Society Anniversary Research Professorship.

Jon Driver used an integrative methodological approach combining psychophysical, neuropsychological, neuroimaging and TMS, and was one of the first to perform concurrent TMS-fMRI to study how dynamic interactions between brain regions can support cognitive functions.

Jon Driver's work revealed differential influences on face processing from attention and emotion in the human brain, with the amygdala response to threat-related expressions unaffected by a manipulation of attention that strongly modulates the response to faces in fusiform gyri.

Jon Driver probed the neural mechanisms of crossmodal links in attention - such as sudden touch on one hand improving vision near that hand - showing that these can be mediated by back-projections from multimodal parietal areas to unimodal visual cortex.

Jon Driver's research was funded by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the James S McDonnell Foundation, and The Stroke Association.

Jon Driver authored over 200 scientific publications, and his work has been cited over 50,000 times.

Jon Driver played an instrumental role as a member of the team leading UCL's successful bid for the Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre.

Jon Driver was brought up in Hull and attended Hymers College, where he played cello in the school orchestra and played bass guitar in a number of bands in Hull.

Jon Driver took his own life in London on 28 November 2011, aged 49, ten months after shattering his knee in a motorcycle accident which left him in debilitating chronic pain.

Jon Driver is survived by his wife, Nilli Lavie, and their two sons.