Professor David J Nutt (Imperial College London, UK)
How Scotland can use neuroscience to lead the world in drugs and alcohol policy?
Biography:
Professor Nutt was trained at Guy’s Hospital, London, and became a Wellcome Senior Fellow in psychiatry at the University of Oxford. He was Chief of the Section of Clinical Science in the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in NIH, Bethesda, USA, and subsequently set up the Psychopharmacology Unit in Bristol University. He is currently the Edmond J Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Professor Nutt has served in a number of leadership roles. He is currently Chair of DrugScience and President of the European Brain Council. He has been President of the BNA, the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and British Association of Psychopharmacology. In addition he is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Psychiatrists and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a member of the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy. He has edited the Journal of Psychopharmacology for over two decades and acts as psychiatry drugs advisor to the British National Formulary.
He was the clinical scientific lead on the 2004/5 UK Government Foresight initiative “Brain science, addiction and drugs” that provided a 25-year vision for this area of science and public policy and in 2006 he was Director of Bristol Neuroscience. He has been member and Chair of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD – 1998-2009). Other previous national contributions include serving as the medical expert on the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act (2000 Runciman report), and membership of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, the Committee on NHS drugs and the Ministry of Defence Science Advisory Board.
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Dr Adrian Owen (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
The search for consciousness
Biography:
Before assuming his Canada Excellence Research Chair at The University of Western Ontario, Adrian Owen was a senior scientist and assistant director of the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. His work there, and at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre at the University of Cambridge, used functional neuroimaging to explore attention, memory and control in brain‑injured and healthy volunteers.
Adrian Owen received his PhD in neuroscience from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, England, and his BSc in Psychology from University College London. Following his PhD he moved to the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University. He was awarded The Pinsent Darwin Scholarship by the University of Cambridge in 1996 and returned to the UK to work at the newly opened Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, Cambridge. In 1997 he moved to the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU), Cambridge (formally the Applied Psychology Unit) to set up the neuroimaging programme there and to pursue his research in cognitive neuroscience. He was made Assistant Director of the MRC CBU in 2005. In 2011 Dr Owen took up a position as Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at The University of Western Ontario (UWO).
Research Interests:
Adrian Owen has spent the last 20 years pioneering breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience. His work has been published in prestigious journals such as The Lancet, Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine.
Amongst the most impressive and exciting breakthroughs was the development of neuroimaging techniques that could be used to detect awareness in patients with ‘locked-in’ syndrome, or patients in a persistent vegetative state. These could be used to open channels of communication with such patients.
In the long-term, Dr Owen aims to develop new brain-computer interfaces that will allow severely brain-injured patients to communicate with the outside world and will expand their possible choices for therapy.
Studying patients who have sustained brain injuries that result in disorders of consciousness, as well as, patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Dr Owen’s team aims to understand more about the causes and consequences of the memory, perception and reasoning problems that many of them experience.
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