« Personen

CURRENT ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
Senior Professor, Institute of Biology, Otto-von-Guericke Universität, Magdeburg, Germany
Professor of Neuroscience Emeritus, Dept Anatomy, Physiology & Genetics, University of Oxford, UK
 
EDUCATION
1981              PhD, Natural Sciences (Biology/Psychology), University of Cambridge, UK
1976              BA Hons, Natural Sciences (Psychology), University of Cambridge, UK
 
PREVIOUS APPOINTMENTS
1985 – 2021 University Lecturer (Associate Professor), then Full Professor of Neuroscience (1996)
        Dept Anatomy, Physiology & Genetics, University of Oxford, UK
1990 – 2021 Official Fellow and Tutor in Physiology, also Principal Bursar (2009-2020)
        St John’s College Oxford
1985             Visiting Scientist
        Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, Palo Alto, California, USA
1984             Visiting Scientist 
        MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab., Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
1980-1983    Rudolph and Ann Rork Light Research Fellow 
        St. Catherine's College and University Lab of Physiology, Oxford, UK
1979-1980    Beit Memorial Fellow 
        University Lab of Physiology, Oxford, UK 
 
HONOURS AND AWARDS
2019             Leibniz Fellow, Leibniz Institute of Neurobiology, Magdeburg
2018             Physiological Society: GL Brown Prize Lecturer
2016             Chinese Academy of Sciences, Presidential International Fellow
2011             ScD, University of Cambridge
2010             FRSB, Fellow of Royal Society of Biology (by resolution of Council).
2005             Royal Society: Wolfson Research Merit Award.
2004             Royal Society: Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow.
2002             Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: Invited Visiting Scholar
2000             James S McDonnell Foundation: 21^st Century Scientist Award
 
ACADEMIC MENTORSHIP 
Doctoral Research Students
1985-2022    Eighteen (18) DPhil successfully completed, University of Oxford
Postdoctoral Scholars
1989-2019    Fourteen (14) in total, all of whom remain in academic posts internationally
Among the above, there have been 10 associated female scientists, of whom 5 now hold Professorships, including Oxford, St Andrews, Newcastle, Germany, USA
 
TEACHING ACTIVITIES
University of Oxford and St John’s College: Full teaching and examining load, except during periods of “buy-out”.
 
MAJOR COLLABORATIONS
John Reynolds, SALK Institute, San Diego, USA
Adam Kohn, Mount Sinai, USA
Holly Bridge, Betina Ip, Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford
 
ACTIVITIES RELATED TO RESEARCH
2022-current     The Physiological Society: Honorary Treasurer and Member of Trustee Board 
2018-current     Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, Scientific Advisory Board, Institute of Primate Neuroscience
2016-current     Vision, MDPI. Founding Editor and Editor in Chief
2012-current     Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, Associate Editor, 
2010                 University of Leuven Belgium: International Evaluation Panel for Centers of Excellence.
2003-2009         Director, Oxford McDonnell-Pew Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
2000-2004         Course Director, Oxford University Wellcome Trust Graduate Programme in
             Neuroscience.
Assessor for professorial appointment and tenure review:  Oxford University, Newcastle University; University of Surrey; University of St Andrews; University of Cambridge; Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Washington University, Saint Louis; UC Los Angeles, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Göttingen.
 
OTHER PROFESSIONAL AND PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITIES
2011-2019    Founder and Chair of Trustees for Europa School UK http://www.europaschooluk.org
2017             Contributor to Lab Animal Tour http://www.labanimaltour.org
2012             Scientific Mentor for finalist in BBC Radio 4 “So you want to be a Scientist?” 
2006-2010    National Centre for 3Rs (NC3Rs): Working Party on Macaques
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165027010005157
 
SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS

2018          Prize Lectures: Physiological Society GL Brown Prize Lecture (London, York, Sheffield,
                  Edinburgh, Cardiff, Birmingham & Oxford)
2019          Invited speaker, “2019 IBRO/ICPBR Summer School on Primate Neurobiology”
                  Shanghai, China.
2022          Invited speaker, European Summer School “Visual Neuroscience from Spikes to
                  Awareness” Marburg/Giessen, Germany.
2023          Invited speaker, Systems Visual Neuroscience Summer School, Max Planck Institute Tübingen
2023          McGovern Center seminar at Peking University, China 
                        https://mgv.pku.edu.cn/english/ns/seminars/370792.htm
2024         Invited speaker and contributor to Generative Adversarial Collaboration, Cognitive and      Computational Neuroscience Meeting 2024, Boston, Massachusetts, USA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJOuWKTixX0
TEN YEAR TRACK RECORD
Generally, my h-index stands at 48 (Google Scholar) and my i-10 for the last 5 years is 50. Despite holding a major administrative appointment in the university throughout the last 10 years, I held external research funding as PI/Co-PI in excess of £7million and managed the UK regulatory and ethical processes concerned with my lab’s work with non-human primates (NHP). I now hold two research grants from the DFG at Magdeburg in Germany. I established new links for my group with China as a Presidential International Fellow of CAS and membership of a scientific advisory board in Shanghai. I became Founding Editor of a new specialist journal. I have grouped my publications and scientific track record for the last 10 years around 5 themes.
 
1) Neurophysiology of perceptual behaviour with large scale multi-electrode recording
Smith JET and Parker AJ (2021) Correlated structure of neuronal firing in macaque visual cortex limits information for binocular depth discrimination. Journal of Neurophysiology, 126: 275-303 10.1152/jn.00667.2020  This recent paper demonstrates the technical platform on which the proposed new studies will be based. I planned the study, wrote the grant application and worked with Jackson Smith to implement all details including monkey training, surgery for electrode implantation and data analysis. Several further papers are on the way. Jackson Smith moved to a senior position at Ernst Strungemann Institute, Frankfurt at the end of the MRC grant.
 
2) Neuroscience and Aesthetics
Huang, M., Bridge, H., Kemp, M.J. and A.J. Parker (2011) Human cortical activity evoked by the assignment of authenticity when viewing works of art. Front. Hum. Neurosci. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2011.00134. This strand of work began with a ground-breaking paper in neuroscience and aesthetics, which was featured by BBC Today programme and other media sources and translated into Italian (nodes, anno VI n. 9-10, 2017). It led to two focused reviews (Revealing Rembrandt. Front Neurosci. 8:76 10.3389/fnins.2014.00076; Fakes and Forgeries in the Brain Scanner. Front. Young Minds. 6:39 10.3389/frym.2018.00039), two book chapters and an article in Routledge’s forthcoming prestigious Art History Now: Theories, Methods, Approaches, editor Geraldine Johnson. The combined publications have more than 50000 ‘reads’ on the Frontiers website. I established the collaboration with Martin Kemp as Professor of History of Art and planned the study with Mengfei Huang and Holly Bridge.
 
3) Magnetic resonance spectroscopy
Ip IB, Berrington A, Hess AT, Parker AJ, Emir UE and Bridge HB (2017) Combined fMRI-MRS acquires simultaneous glutamate and BOLD-fMRI signals in the human brain,
NeuroImage, 155: 113-119. 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.04.030  Ground-breaking study, the first to achieve simultaneous MRS and fMRI in human cortex. Already over 100 citations on GS. Led to two further papers, one in Journal of Neuroscience, and most importantly a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship for my former graduate student and post-doc, Betina Ip.
 
4) The physiology of binocular vision
Parker AJ (2016) Vision in a 3-D world. 10.1098/rstb.2015.0251.  Phil Trans Royal Society B: I was invited as guest editor for a special issue of this leading journal. I contributed two papers (10.1098/rstb.2015.0260; 10.1098/rstb.2015.0261) and edited all contributions. This exemplifies one of my core activities: to advance fundamental discoveries about binocular vision and consolidate these into a new framework. I also have written review articles for the New Visual Neurosciences (MIT Press editors Chalupa and Werner) and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia. This activity also led to my invitation to deliver the GL Brown lectures of the UK Physiological Society.
 
5) Causal interventions in visual processing.
My lab has a long-standing interest in causal intervention in visual processing. One study that was influential for this proposal was to examine binocular vision in the visual agnosic individual DF (see Bridge, H., Thomas, O.M., Minini, L., Cavina-Pratesi, C., Milner, A.D. and Parker, A.J. (2013) Structural and functional changes across the visual cortex of a patient with visual form agnosia.
Journal of Neuroscience, 33:12779-12791 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4853-12.2013, collaboration with Milner lab at Durham, UK). More recently I collaborated in the investigation of a rare, naturally-occurring case of ‘blindsight’ in a macaque monkey (Bridge H, Bell AH, Ainsworth M, Sallet J, Premereur E, Ahmed B, Mitchell AS, Schüffelgen U, Buckley, M, Tendler BC, Miller KL, Mars, RB, Parker AJ, Krug, K., 2019, Preserved extrastriate visual network in a monkey with substantial, naturally occurring damage to primary visual cortex. eLife (10.7554/eLife.42325). As a result of these and many other activities, my colleague and former student, Holly Bridge, has been promoted to Full Professor at Oxford. 
 
Separately from this, I have collaborated with Cumming and Krug to examine the effects of focal electrical microstimulation on perceptual decisions. (Krug, K, Cicmil, N., Parker, A.J. and Cumming, B.G. (2013) A causal role for V5/MT neurons coding motion-disparity conjunctions in resolving perceptual ambiguity. Current Biology, 23:1454-1459. 10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.023; Cicmil N, Cumming BG, Parker AJ, Krug K (2015) Reward modulates the effect of visual cortical microstimulation on perceptual decisions.  eLife 10.7554/eLife.07832). Kristine Krug now holds a Heisenberg Professorship at OvGU Magdeburg, Germany
 
Academic Leadership
 
I have recently been appointed Hon Treasurer and Trustee Member of Council of the Physiological Society in the UK as from September 2022. In my current role at Magdeburg, I have been elected as a Leibniz Fellow of the Leibniz Institute of Neurobiology. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and have been awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Cambridge. I have contributed to the ethical debate and public understanding of science in the use of NHPs for scientific research, presenting the case through web-based materials and a written paper on science policy and ethics. I have undertaken a substantial number of invited external lectures and seminars.
 
Recognised innovation leadership.
 
During the last 10 years, I held a major administrative leadership role at Oxford. Working closely with the President of St John’s College, I had primary responsibility for the College’s £600million endowment and some 250 staff. In this role, I led the College to develop a major site in Oxford for the establishment of a science innovation district (Oxford North, www.oxfordnorth.com), which was this year consolidated with a £700million investment for life sciences facilities. I continue as a non-executive director of Thomas White Oxford, the investment vehicle of St John’s College.
 
As a higher education professional, in 2011-12 I led a group of educators and parents to found a new Oxfordshire school, as a multilingual, multicultural school teaching a bilingual programme with an accreditation as an EU European School. Unlike any other UK state school, this provided 50:50 teaching in English with either French, German or Spanish from age 5-18. This was a voluntary effort, for which I led the team that successfully proposed the academic and financial programme for new school to the UK Government’s Department for Education and continued as the Founding Chair of Governors until 2017, finally leaving the Governing Body in 2019 as Brexit negotiations completed.