Karalyn Patterson

In 1975, Patterson moved to England to take a position at the Applied Psychology Unit of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge.^[7]

Patterson is one of a select group of academics that are fellows of both the Royal Society, the UK's national academy for science, and the British Academy, the UK's national academy for humanities and social sciences.^[5] Her nomination for the Royal Society reads:

Karalyn Patterson was one of the prime initiators of the field of cognitive neuropsychology. The different approaches she has developed to study brain based disorders of language and memory have brought great rigour to the field, and have allowed stringent tests of different theories. She is one of the very few people in the world able to adopt a truly multi-disciplinary approach including computational modelling, behavioural observation, neuropsychological testing and functional neuroimaging. Consequently, her work has led to a better understanding of how language and memory are organised in the brain, and how they unravel in Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.^[2]

In 2020, Patterson was awarded the Suffrage Science Life Sciences Award.^[8]

In addition to her academic roles, Patterson has an interest in food and wine, and has served as a wine steward at Darwin College, Cambridge.^[1][9] Patterson is married to Roy D. Patterson.^[1]