A Short Guide to Brain Imaging

Richard E. Passingham received a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Oxford, UK, and a Ph.D from the University of London, UK. He returned to Oxford in 1971 and was made a University Lecturer and Fellow of Wadham College in 1976. He was made an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the MRC Cyclotron Unit in 1988 and then an Honorary Principal at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience in 1996. He was made a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford in 1997. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009 and of the Association for Psychological Science in 2010.

After reading medical sciences and experimental psychology at Cambridge University (1991) Dr Rowe completed clinical training at Oxford (1994), and went on to complete his neurology specialist training in London (2005). His PhD at the Functional Imaging Laboratory (2001) used functional brain imaging to study how we choose our behaviours, in health and disease. His Wellcome Trust senior research fellowship examines the cognitive physiology of neurodegenerative disease, including frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease and primary tauopathies. He combines advances in magnetoencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging with computational modelling in order to measure the impact of disease and drugs on synaptic physiology in humans. The integration of brain imaging with psychopharmacology, guided be preclinical research provides a powerful platform to understand cognition and behaviour, and evaluate the efficacy and mechanisms of novel therapeutics.