Adrian Owen

Early life and education

Adrian Owen was born 17 May 1966 in Gravesend, England, and educated at Gravesend Grammar School. He completed his PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London (now part of King's College London) between 1988 and 1992.

Career

In 1992, Owen moved to the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University to work with Michael Petrides and Brenda Milner. He was awarded The Pinsent Darwin Scholarship by the University of Cambridge in 1996 and returned to the UK to work at the newly opened Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, Cambridge. In 1997 he moved to the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU), Cambridge (formally the Applied Psychology Unit) to set up the neuroimaging programme there and to pursue his research in cognitive neuroscience. He was awarded MRC tenure in 2000 and made Assistant Director of the MRC CBU in 2005, with overall responsibility for the onsite imaging facilities (3T Siemens Tim Trio MRI and 306-channel Elekta-Neuromag MEG systems).

In 2010, Owen was awarded a $10M Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at The University of Western Ontario (UWO) and moved most of his research team to Canada in order to take up this position in January 2011.

Research

Over the last 20 years, Owen has published more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers and over 35 chapters and (edited) books. His work has appeared in many of the world's most prestigious scientific and medical journals, including Science, Nature, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. His H-Index (Google Scholar) is currently 87.

His early publications on patients with frontal or temporal-lobe excisions pioneered the use of touch screen based computerised cognitive tests in neuropsychology. Over the last 20 years, these tests have gone on to be used in more than 600 published studies of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, Depression, Schizophrenia, Autism, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and ADHD, among others.

His post-doctoral research on working memory with Michael Petrides, (PNAS, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain and others) was instrumental in refuting the then prevailing view of lateral frontal-lobe organisation advanced by Patricia Goldman-Rakic and others, and is still widely cited in that context. His 1996 paper on the organisation of working memory processes within the human frontal lobe continues to be one of the most highly cited articles ever to appear in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex.

His 2006 paper in the journal Science demonstrated that functional neuroimaging could be used to detect awareness in a patient who was incapable of generating any recognised behavioural response and appeared to be in a vegetative state. This landmark discovery has implications for clinical care, diagnosis, medical ethics and medical/legal decision-making (relating to the prolongation, or otherwise, of life after severe brain injury). In a follow up paper in 2010 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Owen and his team used a similar method to allow a man believed to be in a vegetative state for more than 5 years to answer 'yes' and 'no' questions with responses that were generated solely by changing his patterns of fMRI activity.

This research attracted international attention from the world’s media; it was reported in many hundreds of newspapers around the world (including twice on the front page of the New York Times and other quality journals) and has been widely discussed on television (e.g. BBC News, Channel 4 News, ITN News, Sky News, CNN), radio (e.g. BBC World Service) ‘Outlook’ documentary, NPR Radio (USA), BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4), in print (e.g. full featured articles in The New Yorker The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer Magazine etc.) and online (including Nature, Science and The Guardian podcasts). To date, the discovery has featured prominently in 6 television documentaries including 60 Minutes (USA), Panorama BBC Special Report (UK), Inside Out (BBC TV series) (UK), and CBC The National (Canada).

In 2009, Owen and his colleague, Adam Hampshire, launched Cambridge Brain Sciences, a free web-based platform for members of the public and the wider scientific community to assess their cognitive function using scientifically proven tests of memory, attention, reasoning and planning. To date, the tests on the site have been taken by more than 100,000 people worldwide.

In April 2010, Owen and his team published the largest ever public test of computer-based brain training in the journal Nature. The study, conducted in conjunction with the BBC, showed that practice on brain training games does not transfer to other mental skills. More than 11,000 adults followed a six-week training regime, completing computer-based tasks on the BBC's website designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, visuospatial skills and attention. Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained, no evidence was found for 'transfer' effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related. Details of the results were revealed on BBC1 in Can You Train Your Brain?, a Bang Goes the Theory special and published on the same day in Nature.

In November 2011, Owen led a study that was published in a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal, The Lancet. The Researchers found a method for assessing whether or not some patients who appear to be vegetative, are in fact, conscious and are just not able to respond. This new method is using electroencephalography (EEG), which is not only less expensive than MRI, but is also portable and can be taken right to the patients bedside for testing.

Other academic roles

Owen also held/holds affiliations with:

Awards

Personal life

Owen lives in London, Ontario with his son, Jackson. He has one brother, Christopher J. Owen, who is Professor of Physics and Head of the Space Plasma Group at University College London (UCL) Department of Space and Climate Physics. He also has one sister, Frances Walsh who is an Oncology Research Nurse, in Warwickshire England. For the past twenty-years, Owen has played guitar and sung in various bands made up of fellow scientists and musicians.