Cornelia McCormick studied Psychology and Medicine at the University of Hamburg. After her studies, she completed her PhD from 2010 to 2014 at the University of Toronto, Canada under supervision of Prof. McAndrews and Prof. Moscovitch in cognitive neuroscience with the title “Neural networks underlying episodic memory”. From 2014 until 2018 she conducted postdoctoral work with Prof. Maguire at the University College London on the specific contributions of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex to episodic memory and visuospatial mental imagery. Since 2018, Cornelia works at the Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases and Geriatric Psychiatry at the University Hospital Bonn and leads a research group “Memory and Imagination”. Concurrently to her clinical residency training (2018-2023), she completed the German Habilitation process, secured significant research funding, and is firmly involved in the educational training of students.

Her research group focuses on the neural basis of episodic memory and imagination, and in particular the roles played by the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The central thrust of her work is that this neural machinery supports not only memory but all cognitive and affective functions that depend on vivid mental imagery. Cornelia employes a variety of cognitive neuroscientific methods, including functional MRI, eye-tracking, etc. in healthy participants and in people with aphantasia, temporal lobe epilepsy and neurodegenerative diseases.