Geraint Rees

Geraint Rees
Geraint Rees in August 2010
Born	November 27, 1967 (1967-11-27) [citation needed] Cambridge, UK
Nationality	British
Education	BA (1988), BMBch (1991), PhD (1999)
Alma mater	Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (1985–1988) New College, Oxford (1988–1991) University College London (1995–1999)
Occupation	Professor of cognitive neurology, Consultant neurologist
Employer	Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London
Known for	Consciousness research, brain imaging
Awards	Crick Lecture 2007
Website
Geraint Rees faculty webpage

Geraint Rees FMedSci is Deputy Head of the UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences, Director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and a Professor of Cognitive Neurology and Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow at University College London.

Biography

After medical training in Cambridge, Oxford and London, he completed his PhD degree under the supervision of Chris Frith at University College London's Functional Imaging Laboratory in 1999. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Christof Koch's laboratory at the California Institute of Technology for two years before returning to the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London in 2001. In 2002 he became a group leader with the award of a Senior Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. His Senior Fellowship was renewed for a further five years in 2007. His work has been internationally recognised with the award in 2003 of the Young Investigator Medal of The Organization for Human Brain Mapping. In 2007 he was awarded the Experimental Psychology Society Prize and gave the Royal Society Francis Crick Lecture. In February 2009 he gave the Goulstonian lecture of the Royal College of Physicians His H-index is 40.

In 2007 he was elected Secretary and Treasurer of the Guarantors of Brain, and he is an Associate Editor of the journal Brain. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He is a member of the Medical Research Council Neuroscience and Mental Health Board and a member of the Medical Programme Board for England.. His Who's Who (UK) entry lists his recreation as 'achieving a better work/life balance'

Research

His work focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying human consciousness in health and disease . At present most work focuses on the neural correlates of particular types of conscious content, aiming to distinguish between conscious and unconscious representations in the human brain. As a considerable amount is already known about the anatomy and physiology of the visual system, much of the research in the laboratory focuses on visual awareness. However, his laboratory also studies the auditory and somatosensory systems. Most research involves functional MRI at high field, in combination with behavioral studies, transcranial magnetic stimulation and EEG/MEG. Previous work by Rees has suggested that subjective awareness of objects in the visual environment is associated not just with enhanced activation in visual areas of the occipital lobe, but also areas of parietal and prefrontal cortex often associated with attention. A major focus of this work is therefore in studying interactions between visual cortex and these areas, both in the context of attention, and with respect to eye movements.

He co-edited a large reference book entitled the Neurobiology of Attention with Laurent Itti and John Tsotsos, and is the author of numerous articles and invited reviews on the functional imaging of consciousness.

He was a member of the board of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness until stepping down in 2007, and with Patrick Wilken organised its tenth annual meeting that was held at St. Anne's College, Oxford in June 2006.

Teaching and training

Rees has been the elected Deputy Chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) Medical Academic Staff Committee (MASC) since 2007, and leads on policy development concerning medical academic training. He is a member of the Medical Programme Board for England, chairs the MPB Recruitment Task and Finish Group overseeing recruitment of all trainee doctors in England. He served on the 'Walport' committee of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration developing Academic Clinical Fellow and Clinical Lecturer schemes, and leads the local ACF and CL schemes at University College London. He was also course director for over a decade for the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) Part 1 courses in London run by Pastest.

Selected publications

• Fleming, S. M.; Weil, R. S.; Nagy, Z.; Dolan, R. J.; Rees, G. (2010). "Relating Introspective Accuracy to Individual Differences in Brain Structure". Science 329 (5998): 1541–1543. doi:10.1126/science.1191883. PMID 20847276. 
• Haynes, J. D.; Deichmann, R.; Rees, G. (2005). "Eye-specific effects of binocular rivalry in the human lateral geniculate nucleus". Nature 438 (7067): 496–499. doi:10.1038/nature04169. PMC 1351280. PMID 16244649. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1351280. 

External links

• Geraint Rees on Twitter