A little about me

I was born and brought up in Peterborough, England. I was an undergraduate at Oxford, taking my BA degree in Animal Physiology in 1963, and then completed my medical degrees at St Thomas's Hospital in London, after a DPhil in brain research in Oxford . I worked in that field throughout my career, in the Universities of Oxford, California at Berkeley and Lausanne in Switzerland, Imperial College London, the National University of Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates University. My interests have spanned the structure and development of the visual system and the human cerebral cortex, including morphological correlates of schizophrenia. I have been active in the development of human brain banking, especially in relation to schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. However, an interesting sideline spurred by my sojourn in the UAE was into aspects of the camel brain!

For a number of years I was on the editorial board of Experimental Brain Research, and one of my tasks was to compile a special issue, published in 2006, devoted to the 2005 International Neuroscience Conference in Al Ain, UAE, organized by the Al Ain Neuroscience Group which I initiated while working in the UAE University there.

I am also a professional anatomist, with a particular interest in applied and surgical anatomy, which has led me to travel widely teaching and examining. I was a member of the Council of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

I was an organizer of the first World Congress of IBRO, the International Brain Research Organization, in Lausanne in 1982. I was later founder Chair of IBRO's Neuroscience Programmes Network the aim of which was to provide a forum for disseminating information about training programmes available world-wide, especially in the less developed countries.

Another of my interests is the history of neuroscience, and I have translated several works from French and German, including Brodmann's "Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex".