Colin Blakemore is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Professor at Warwick and the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore. He is also Chair of the Food Standard Agency’s General Advisory Committee on Science, and a member of Legal & General’s Longevity Science Advisory Panel.

He is President of the Motor Neurone Disease Association and of Brain Tumour UK. From 2003-7 he was Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council. From 1996-2003 he was Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford. He studied Medical Sciences at Cambridge and completed a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.

His research prizes include the Robert Bing Prize from the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, the Prix Netter from the French Académie Nationale de Médecine, the Gregg Medal of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists, the John P. McGovern Science and Society Medal from Sigma Xi, the international Alcon Prize for vision research and both the Ferrier Prize and the Michael Faraday Prize (for furtherance of the public understanding of science) from the Royal Society.

He has been President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and the Biosciences Federation (now the Society of Biology).

He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and television, and he writes about science for a general audience.