Rate My Professor Celia Harris

Associate Professor Celia Harris holds the position of Associate Professor in Cognitive Science at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, School of Psychology, Western Sydney University. She completed her PhD at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, in 2010. In 2011, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center of Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University, Denmark. Returning to Macquarie University in 2012, she held a Macquarie University Research Fellowship followed by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award to investigate shared remembering in couples as a support against cognitive decline. In 2020, she joined Western Sydney University as Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience and became Director of Impact and Engagement at the MARCS Institute in 2021. Her research examines autobiographical memory retrieval processes, focusing on how internal cognitive mechanisms interact with external cues from people, objects, and devices to enhance memory access. She studies collaborative and shared remembering, memory compensation strategies in everyday life, and their applications to aging, cognitive decline, and dementia care, including reminiscing programs for aged care workers and technology aids like MemoryAid.

Harris has produced 78 research outputs, including highly cited works such as 'The psychology of memory, extended cognition, and socially distributed remembering' (Sutton, Harris, Keil & Barnier, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2010), 'A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memory' (Barnier, Sutton, Harris & Wilson, Cognitive Systems Research, 2008), 'The functions of autobiographical memory: An integrative approach' (Harris, Rasmussen & Berntsen, Memory, 2014), and the authored book 'Collaborative Remembering: Theories, Research, and Applications' (Meade, Harris, Van Bergen, Sutton & Barnier, Oxford University Press, 2018). She received the 2020 NSW Young Tall Poppy Science Award and was appointed a 2021 STEM Ambassador by Science & Technology Australia. Her projects include leading 'Improving aged care with memory conversations' (2023-2026) and MemoryAid, a finalist in the UK Longitude Prize on Dementia.