PABLO FERNANDEZ VELASCO

I am a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy of the University of York, and an affiliated member of the Spiers Lab at the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience of University College London. I work on philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and a big aspect of my research lies in interdisciplinary collaboration. I see philosophy both as a way of advancing interdisciplinary work through the development of solid theoretical foundations, and as a way of connecting scientific advances to pressing social issues.

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. 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.

I completed my doctoral work at the Institut Jean Nicod of Ecole Normale Superieure in 2021. Since then, I have published academic articles in top journals across a variety of disciplines, and my work has received media attention in venues including El País, Le Monde, Irish Times, Psychology Today, Radio France, and New Scientist. In 2022, I was the runner-up of the Annual Essay Prize from the International Society for Social Ontology, and in 2021 I was awarded the Annual Essay Prize from the Antwerp Centre for Philosophical Psychology.