Peter Kok - EU Funding

We are pleased to share that Peter Kok has been awarded the Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Peter’s project titled “The role of memory in perception: neural mechanisms and computations” was selected from a competitive application pool of 3,121 applications.

Peter was among 5 UCL researchers and 349 worldwide researchers to be awarded the Consolidator Grant. With a total budget of €728 million, the Consolidator Grants will support “outstanding researchers with a proven track record, and between 7 to 12 years of experience after completing their PhD.”

Sharing his reaction, Peter added "I am very excited and grateful to have been awarded this funding. It will allow our team to push towards a new frontier in perception research: does the hippocampus, a canonical memory structure, change how we see the world? I want to thank all the colleagues in my team and the department for their support in making this possible. Also a big thank you to the reviewers - I noted that my proposal was evaluated by eight (!) colleagues, and I greatly appreciate the time they put in to do so. (To return the favour, I have reviewed three grant proposals by colleagues worldwide since having been awarded the Consolidator.) Finally, thank you to the ERC for generously funding a huge amount of basic science, evaluated purely on the basis of scientific excellence. While it is tempting to focus on immediate economic or clinical impact, basic science is the bedrock of progress and the ERC plays a major role in facilitating it in Europe."

Within the Imaging Neuroscience department, Peter is the Principal Research Fellow of the Visual Perception group. The group explores the influences of prior knowledge and expectations on perception.