Speaker Details

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Fullerian Professor of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University, heads a team of scientists who are focused on the genetics of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. She is the first female director of the 204-year-old Royal Institution of Great Britain and a cofounder of two biotech start-ups that specialize in brain diseases. She holds a seat in the House of Lords, has hosted a BBC series on the brain, and wrote The Human Brain: A Guided Tour. Her most recent book was Tomorrow's People: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel.

It is rare that an individual with highly specialised knowledge can communicate it to a general audience. If Susan Greenfield is a ubiquitous media figure it's because not only does she talk about the brain so clearly but she also passes on some of the excitement of working with scientific ideas. Susan talks about the brain the way other people talk about fine art or football. It is a thing of endless beauty and fascination.

Perhaps the public have taken to her because they recognise that she is, by her own account, something of a maverick. Susan was the first member of her family to go to university – her mother was a chorus girl, her father an electrician – and she grew up with this idea that everything was a laugh. Unusually for an Oxford Professor of Physiology, she doesn't have a chemistry O-level and suspects she would score poorly in an IQ test. She was the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and has written a book about the brain aimed at non-scientific readers.

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