Spouse Harry Baker | Name Rosalind Ridley | |
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Alma mater Newnham College, Cambridge Institute of Psychiatry, London Thesis Responsiveness of units in part of inferotemporal and foveal prestriate cortex of the monkey during visual discrimination performance (1977) Doctoral students Dr Lucy AnnettDr Helen BarefootDr Andisheh Eslamboli | ||
Doctoral advisor George Ettlinger | ||
Ros Ridley, MA (Cantab), PhD (London), ScD (Cantab) (born 21 October 1949) retired as Head of the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom)'s Comparative Cognition Research Team in the Department of Psychology, Cambridge, UK, in 2005. She was a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1995 – 2010 and Vice-Principal from 2000-2005. She now holds the Privileges of a Fellow Emerita at Newnham College.
Contents
Her current interests include art and painting. She is a member of the Cambridge Drawing Society and the Cambridge District Art Circle
Education and career
Rosalind Mary Ridley was born in 1949 in Coventry, UK and educated at Barr's Hill Grammar School, Coventry and Newnham College, Cambridge University. After reading Natural Sciences in Cambridge, majoring in Psychology, she studied for her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London under the supervision of Professor George Ettlinger. In 1977, she joined the Medical Research Council, working in the Department of Psychiatry, Clinical Research Centre, Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, London and, in 1994, moved to the Department of Psychology, Cambridge University as Head of the Medical Research Council's Comparative Cognition External Scientific Staff Team.
Personal life
Rosalind Ridley is married to Dr Harry Baker with whom she collaborated over much of her scientific career.
Research
Rosalind Ridley's research career started with an investigation into cortical mechanisms of visual perception followed by the delineation of the cortical areas involved in somatosensory discrimination learning. Her early career involved work on the role of dopamine in cognitive perseveration and motor stereotypy, but her interests then extended to the role of the hippocampus in simple and conditional learning. Much of her research effort was directed towards developing treatments for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease. She, and her research collaborators, demonstrated that acetylcholine was crucial for various types of memory formation and established that transplantation of neural tissue into the brain could restore memory and learning ability. She also maintained an interest in the genetics of neurodegenerative diseases.
Rosalind Ridley was involved in early work on transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (subsequently known as prion disease), particularly in the recognition that individual cases of human prion disease could be sporadic, familial or acquired and that familial cases were associated with mutations in the prion protein gene. She demonstrated the transmissibility of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and scrapie to primates and argued that the evidence for BSE and scrapie being acquired by maternal transmission was also compatible with genetic susceptibility to disease. In experiments using data extending over 25 years, she demonstrated that the amyloid proteins found in Alzheimer's disease were self-assembling and experimentally transmissible, establishing a link in pathogenesis between prion diseases and the other neurodegenerative proteinopathies
Books
Fatal Protein. The story of CJD, BSE and other prion diseases (1998) Ridley, R. M. and Baker, H. F. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0 19 852435 8
Prion Diseases (1996) Baker, H. F. and Ridley, R. M. Eds. (1996) Humana Press Inc., Totowa, New Jersey. ISBN 0896033422
Peter Pan and the Mind of J. M. Barrie. An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness" (2016) Ridley, R. M. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-9107-3
Painting collections
Seeing 2008 Blurb Bookstore
Percepts 2010 Blurb Bookstore
Making Images 2012 Blurb Bookstore
Just Looking 2016 Blurb Bookstore