Warm congratulations to Prof. Ruth Byrne from Trinity's School of Psychology who has been announced as a 2025 fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society are individuals whose research has exhibited sustained excellence and had sustained impact on the Cognitive Science community.

Ruth is the Professor of Cognitive Science at Trinity's School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience. Her research expertise is in the cognitive science of human thinking. Her experimental work focuses on reasoning and on imaginative thought, and has advanced theoretical understanding of the common cognitive processes underlying rationality and creativity. 

Her books include, “The rational imagination: how people create alternatives to reality” (2005, MIT press), “Deduction”, co-authored with Phil Johnson-Laird (1991, Erlbaum Associates), and “Thinking, reasoning, and decision-making in autism”, co-edited with Kinga Morsanyi (2019, Routledge). 

Her BA degree was awarded by University College Dublin in 1983 and she completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 1986. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, as a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Wales at Cardiff, and then in the computer science department at University College Dublin, before moving to the psychology department at Trinity College Dublin in 1992. 

She has been a member of the Royal Irish Academy since 2007 and was awarded its 2021 Gold Medal for Social Sciences.