Uta Frith was born Uta Aurnhammer in Rockenhausen in 1941. She grew up in Kaiserslautern and studied experimental psychology at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken from 1961-64. She came to London in 1964; trained in clinical psychology at the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry; and completed her PhD. on autism in 1968. Uta married Chris Frith in 1966. Their sons Martin and Alex were born in 1975 and 1978.
Uta Frith was a staff scientist of the Medical Research Council, first at the MRC Developmental Psychology Unit (Director Neil O'Connor, 1968 - 1982), and later at the MRC Cognitive Development Unit (Director John Morton, 1982-98). She was a founder member of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and was Deputy director and leader of the Developmental Group from 1998 to 2006. From 2006 she became Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Development and from 2007 Research Foundation Professor at the University of Aarhus.
Scientific CareerBeginning with her doctoral work in the Sixties, Uta Frith has contributed to the transformation of developmental psychology into developmental cognitive neuroscience by applying paradigms from information processing theory and neuropsychology to the study of typical and atypical development. She proposed that deficits in critical cognitive mechanisms early in life result in the specific signs and symptoms of autism and dyslexia.
In the case of autism, Uta contributed to two major cognitive theories. In the early 1980s, together with her colleagues Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen, she pioneered the idea of a circumscribed cognitive deficit in the ability to attribute mental states to self and others (mentalising) in autism. The 'mindblindness' theory has guided the successful search for the neural basis of mentalising and its failures, and much of this research was conducted with Francesca Happé, Chris Frith and Fulvia Castelli. Uta Frith also proposed the theory of 'Weak central coherence' to explain superior perceptual and memory abilities in autism. This theory refers to a detail-focussed processing style, which flourishes at the expense of the drive for overall meaning. This idea, which was pursued mainly by Francesca Happé, and more recently, Sarah White, has directed attention to savant skills.
In the case of dyslexia, Uta Frith switched from a primarily visual theory to a phonological theory in the late 1970s. First with Maggie Snowling, and later with Franck Ramus, she has investigated the cognitive phenotype that is defined by persistent difficulties in accessing internally represented forms of words. In a cross-cultural European project with Eraldo Paulesu and Jean-Francoix Demonet she showed that the brain basis of dyslexia in Italian, French and English is the same, while the manifestation of dyslexia in reading and spelling performance differs in the three countries.
AwardsElected Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, 2008
Honorary Fellow Newnham College Cambridge, 2008
UKRC Women of Outstanding Achievement in SET, 2008
Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Göteborg, 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award International Association for Autism Research, 2007 Samuel T. Orton Award International Dyslexia Association, 2007 Honorary Fellow UCL, 2007 Honorary Doctorate University of Nottingham, 2007
Honorary Fellowship University College London, 2007
Elected Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society, 2006
President of the Experimental Psychology Society, 2006-08
Fellow of the Royal Society, 2005-07-09
Burghölzli Award, University of Zuerich, Deparment of Psychiatry
Robert Sommer Award, University of Giessen, Medical School
Honorary Doctorate, York University, 2004
Laurea Honoris Causa, Palermo University, 2004
Jean-Louis Signoret Prize of the Ipsen Foundation, 2003
Fellow of the British Academy, 2001
Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, 2001
Distinguished Lecturer of the Swedish Neuropsychology Society, 2001
International Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychology Society, 2001
Honorary Doctorate, University of St Andrews, 2000
Honorary Doctorate, University of Göteborg, Sweden, 1998
Member of the Academia Europaea, 1992
The President's Award of the British Psychological Society for distinguished contributions to psychological knowledge, 1990 |
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