Prof. Alexandra Woolgar awarded prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant

We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Alexandra Woolgar, our group leader, has been awarded a 2025 ERC Consolidator Grant - receiving a share of the record €728 million budget to support cutting edge research across a broad range of disciplines for up to five years. Prof. Woolgar was one of eight Cambridge based researchers awarded a cumulative total of €17 million in funding from the EU's Horizon Europe programme.

Prof. Alexandra Woolgar (top right) alongside other University of Cambridge ERC grant recipients

This grant will launch PINGSIGHT, an exciting project that will develop new neuroimaging methods to reveal the hidden neural states that underpin flexibility in human cognition.

Human cognition is unique, with the flexibility to create momentary connections between things we see and do in all aspects of the world. This allows us to adapt behaviour, respond to stimuli, form new associations and prioritise our attention as we interact with the world. This is thought to depend on frontoparietal networks (FPN) in the brain, involved in problem-solving, decision making and executive function. But our understanding of this such flexible cognition is difficult because the patterns behind these knowledge states are transient and can be invisible to standard neuroimaging techniques.

PINGSIGHT will develop new methods to reveal these latent states, using auditory, visual and non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) 'pings'. Pinging the brain shortly before and after tasks and tracking how the ping activity propagates through the brain can expose underlying patterns of neural activity. This may help us to understand whether or not hidden brain states underpin flexible responses and selective attention, as well as how. In this way, PINGSIGHT aims to expose how important these 'hidden' neural pathways are for cognition and how to reveal them, creating valuable new tools for study in human brains.