Researchers
Principal investigators
- Professor Ray Dolan (pictured above) studies how emotion influences cognition. A major current focus of his team's work is the influence of emotion on decision making under uncertainty across a range of contexts, and in particular a variety of emotional contexts.
- Professor Karl Friston FRS is a theoretical neurobiologist whose major interest is in developing generic models of how the brain works. He is strongly associated with the development of Statistical Parametric Mapping, which uses advanced mathematical techniques to characterise brain organisation.
- Professor Cathy Price is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. She investigates how the brain processes language, and what the likely effects of brain damage on this are. Her work looks not at speech but at the ability to marshal concepts and use them for thought and expression through any medium. Her research has illuminated the processes through which stroke has a devastating effect on language.
- Professor Geraint Rees studies visual awareness and consciousness. His group seeks to understand the neural basis of human consciousness, and how it can be affected by neurological disease.
- Professor Eleanor Maguire aims to establish how we internally represent large-scale space, our personal (autobiographical) experiences within it, and how both types of memory can be understood within a unified framework that supports our integrated sense of who and where we are. A Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, she also looks at the effects of pathology on memory representations at different points in people's lives (such as developmental disorders in children or dementia in elderly people).
- Professor Semir Zeki studies the visual brain - how we construct the visual world and how discrete aspects of vision are processed and automatically segregated to different parts of the brain. With a Wellcome Trust grant, he has also developed an interest in neuroaesthetics, how our visual brain processes aesthetic values such as beauty.
- Professor Tim Griffiths investigates complex sound processing by the brain ('the mind's ear'). This is not limited to speech, but asks what acoustic properties of our environment are important for our brain to build up an auditory representation of our world.
- Also a principal investigator at the Centre was Professor Jon Driver, who passed away in November 2011. A Wellcome Trust programme grant holder and a Royal Society Anniversary Research Professor, he focused his research on attention and how the brain networks involved are affected by damage, such as that caused by stroke. He also produced insights into unusual and striking disorders of attention such as hemispatial neglect, in which people no longer pay attention to half of their environment.
The Centre collaborates widely with some of the best neuroscientists from around the world. Its location in Queen Square facilitates collaborations with the nearby hospitals and clinical units, including the Gatsby Unit, one of the best computational neuroscience institutes in the world.
