Dr. Kathleen McDermott began her tenure-track position at Washington University in 2001. She is world-renowned for her seminal contributions to the study of false memory, the role of memory in future-oriented cognition, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support learning and memory. In recognition of her many contributions to the science of memory, Kathleen received the F.J. McGuigan Young Investigator Prize from the American Psychological Association in 2005, the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science in 2007, and the Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society in 2019. 

Kathleen is perhaps best known for her work on false memory. In collaboration with Dr. Henry (Roddy) Roediger III, Kathleen developed a list learning paradigm inspired by earlier research by James Deese showing that learning a list of words that are each semantically related to a non-presented associate can result in high rates of false memory for the non-presented word. This simple yet striking demonstration of how easy it is to evoke false memories in the laboratory set the stage for decades of research focusing on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of this phenomenon using what came to be known as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Upon Kathleen’s retirement, the original DRM paper was cited over 5,000 times (Google Scholar) and continues to be a fixture in the study of human memory among cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists around the world. 

Kathleen’s pioneering research on false memory not only shed new light on underlying mechanisms of human memory, but also raised important questions regarding its malleability. She would go on to develop an additional line of research highlighting the adaptive uses of the inherent flexibility of memory in the context of future-oriented cognition. In 2007, Kathleen and her laboratory published one of the first neuroimaging studies demonstrating that the capacity to imagine the future relies on neural networks traditionally associated with retrieval of the personal past. The identification of this close association between memory and future thinking in healthy human adults opened the door to thinking about memory from a new perspective; one highlighting that the function of memory may have less to do with the past and more to do with the future. 

Kathleen also made numerous contributions illuminating the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support the encoding and retrieval of memory. Whether it is her research on how memory tests can expand one’s learning beyond what appeared on a memory test, what kinds of memory tests result in optimal performance, exploring the role of individual differences in learning outcomes, or identifying similarities and differences in the neural networks that support the retrieval of laboratory-based and autobiographical memories, Kathleen always possessed a knack for producing research that filled critical gaps in the learning and memory literature. 

In addition to her prolific publication record, Kathleen was a wonderful mentor and worked closely with many undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral trainees who moved on to start their own research labs around the globe, including: Pooja Agarwal (Berklee College of Music), Katie Arnold (Radford University), Jason Chan (Iowa State University), Shawn Christ (University of Missouri), Bridgid Finn (Educational Testing Service), Adrian Gilmore (University of Delaware), Sean Kang (The University of Melbourne), Steve Nelson (University of Minnesota), Karl Szpunar (Toronto Metropolitan University), Sharda Umanath (Claremont McKenna College), and Jason Watson (University of Colorado Denver). Indeed, many former members of Kathleen’s Memory Lab continue to keep in touch, meet at conferences, and collaborate on new ideas. 

Following retirement, Kathleen plans to turn her attention to traveling, picking up new activities such as pickleball, hiking, and sailing, and is generally excited to discover what her new but still unfamiliar phase of life will bring.