Chief Executive, Medical Research Council
Colin Blakemore, FMedSci, Hon FRCP,
FRS, is a Waynflete Professor of Physiology at the
University of Oxford and he became Chief Executive
of the Medical Research Council in October 2003. From
1996-2003 he was Director of the Centre for Cognitive
Neuroscience at Oxford. Colin Blakemore studied Medical
Sciences and Experimental Psychology at Cambridge and
completed a PhD at the University of California in
Berkeley. His research has been concerned with many
aspects of vision, early development of the brain and
plasticity of the cerebral cortex. His prizes and medals
from medical and scientific academies and societies
include the Robert Bing Prize from the Swiss Academy
of Medical Science, the Prix Netter from the French
Acad é mie Nationale de M é decine, the
Gregg Medal of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists,
the John P McGovern Science and Society Medal from
Sigma Xi, the international Alcon Prize for vision
research and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize
for furtherance of the public understanding of science.
He has been President and Chairman of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, President of the British
Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society
and the Biosciences Federation. Colin Blakemore is
a frequent broadcaster on radio (including the 1976
BBC Reith Lectures, Mechanics of the Mind)
and television (including the 1982 Royal Institution
Christmas lectures on the senses, and The Mind
Machine, a 13-part series on brain and mind, broadcast
on BBC2). His books for the general public include Mechanics
of the Mind (for which he won the Phi Beta Kappa
Award in Science), Images and Understanding, Mindwaves,
The Mind Machine, Gender and Society and The
Oxford Companion to the Body. The Royal Society
have described him as “one of Britain’s
most influential communicators of science”. |
