Research Areas

Medical Sciences Division Themes

• Neuroscience

Colin Blakemore

Colin Blakemore studied Medical Sciences in Cambridge from 1962-5 and completed a PhD in Physiological Optics as a Harkness Fellow at the University of California in 1968. From 1968-79 has was a Demonstrator and then Lecturer in Physiology at Cambridge, and he was also Director of Medical Studies at Downing College. From 1976-9 he held the Royal Society Locke Research Fellowship. In 1979 he was appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford and Professorial Fellow at Magdalen College. From 1996-2003 he was Director of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. Since 2003 he has been on leave while holding the post of Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council. He has maintained research activity at Oxford and from October 2007 he will hold the title of Professor of Neuroscience.

 Colin is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, is an Honorary FRCP and holds Honorary Fellowships from the Institute of Biology and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Foreign Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been President of the British Association, the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and the Biosciences Federation.

 Colin’s research has been concerned with many aspects of vision, early development of the brain and plasticity of the cerebral cortex. His current interests lie in two areas. First, together with Dr Irina Bystron, he is studying the earliest stages of formation of the cerebral cortex in human embryos, using immunocytochemical methods and techniques for tracing the outgrowth of axons to examine the proliferation of neural stem cells, the production, migration and differentiation of cortical neurons, as well the formation of connections into and out of the developing cortex. One aim of this research is to define the developmental errors that underlie cognitive disorders, such as autism, dyslexia and schizophrenia. Colin’s second area of current research, together with Drs Kai Thilo and Meng Liang, uses techniques for imaging activity in the living adult human brain to examine the capacity of sensory areas of the cortex to reorganize their activity during selective attention, during the integration of information from different sensory systems and after the onset of blindness.