Woolgar Lab 2025 round up

As we enter 2026 and the activity in the lab begins to pick up again following a well earned break, now is a good time to reflect on what has been a productive 2025 for the Woolgar Lab.

We have been especially busy, saying both hello and goodbye to a host of new faces, including 6 part ii students (with 4 more joining us this term), 3 summer interns, our gaggle of cognitive neuroscience master's students, a visiting student, a visiting PhD student, a visiting resarcher, and a visiting Roving Researcher (and a partridge in a pear tree!). In particular we bid a fond farewell to Runhao Lu, who successfully completed his PhD and has gone off to an exciting new position as a CIHR Postdoc Fellow over at Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada. We've also said goodbye to Will, an exemplerary research assistant who managed to be incredibly productive in his time here and is now off to the next adventure! And the research group keeps growing - we also had two researchers go on parental leave in 2025, and wished them huge congratulations in the safe arrival of their little ones.

Woolgar Lab 2025 winter lunch

As recently reported, we were thrilled to discover Prof Woolgar was awarded the prestigious ERC consolidator grant (read more about that here) and the group submitted nearly £27 million in centre, research and fellowship applications. Hopefully we'll have more exciting projects to announce this year - watch this space! Meanwhile, work on our BRAIN Foundation grant exploring individual speech processing "fingerprints" in non-speaking autistic individuals is underway. Get in touch here if you are interested or know someone who may be interested in participating.

And finally the group published 12 research papers and 3 preprints across 2025 - well done all! While papers are not the only measure of academic success, it is fantastic nonetheless to be able to share so much of our research output with the wider community. All of our papers are always published 'open access', meaning they are freely available for anyone to read anywhere in the world.

We can't wait to see what 2026 uncovers!