Principal's Medal 2018: Maneesh Kuruvillai
Thursday 6 December 2018
I should now like to introduce the Principal’s Medal. This award was inaugurated nine years ago with a gift from three anonymous donors and is now supported by Ede and Ravenscroft, believed to be the oldest firm of tailors and robe-makers in the world.
The award of the Principal’s Medal recognises students who display exceptional endeavour and achievement during their time at St Andrews. The achievements celebrated are academic as well as sporting, musical, or other attainments.
For the academic year 2017-2018, the Principal’s Medal is being presented to three extraordinary students and today we recognise Maneesh Kuruvilla who has just received his Doctorate in Psychology.
Maneesh’s nomination, made by those most closely connected with his research and the team at the University responsible for communicating our work to wider public, references his intellectual vision as well as his capacity to realise and share that vision.
Maneesh graduated in Economics and Psychology from St Andrews in 2014, before starting his doctoral studies in Psychology. He is described as a scholar of ‘unconstrained "big-picture" scientific thinking’ who has stepped up to address some of the key scientific challenges in his field.
As part of his doctoral studies Maneesh developed an experimental set-up to evaluate how grid cells, the cells that help us understand our position and navigate through space, operate in humans. While the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery of grid cells, a great deal of our understanding of them was speculative and untested in people. Maneesh sought to address this and designed an experiment of such intellectual and practical challenge that his supervisors urged him to scale back. Instead Maneesh addressed each impediment in turn and built an experimental rig of such scale that it could only be contained in the nightclub of the Students’ Association! He successfully completed the experiment – the only one of its kind to have been conducted on humans – and excitingly his work is providing new insights into the role of grid cells in spatial memory, and the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
Aside from intellectual ambition, what distinguishes Maneesh is his deeply-held commitment to share the findings of his research and engage the public with science. Maneesh is described as an ‘incredible’ science communicator, and this talent has been recognised by local and national awards. I have seen Maneesh in action in this capacity, and can testify to his charisma and style; in 2017 I had the pleasure of presenting Maneesh with a prize for coming first in the St Andrews ‘3-minute-thesis’ competition.
He runs a popular website and YouTube channel, Our Memories Our Selves, which explains memory research and his own research to a wider public through text, video, and little more unusually, song. The Episodic Memory Song, composed and sung by Maneesh himself, has been watched a little over four thousand times. This engaging approach to communicating science has won Maneesh invitations to performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Glasgow International Comedy Festival.
Here in St Andrews Maneesh has worked with the town’s state secondary school, Madras College, to build stronger links between their students and ours in order to expand their understanding of psychology and what it means to go to university, doing this in a manner commended as ‘life changing’ and ‘transformative’. I note also that Maneesh’s commitment to St Andrews goes beyond academia; he coaches badminton both at Madras College and the University Sports Centre. In addition Maneesh has been an exceptionally popular Assistant Warden at our student residence Andrew Melville Hall.
I am proud to award you the Principal’s Medal today Maneesh. You have enriched the life of St Andrews as a University, and a town. You are intellectually ambitious and determined, you are funny - and kind. On behalf of us all I wish you every good fortune as you plan to pursue a research career in the years ahead. Please come up and receive your award.
– Principal Sally Mapstone