Professor Ed Bullmore
Professor of Psychiatry
Personal statement
“I was always interested in the question of how the brain might explain mental functions and disorders – which led me into training as a psychiatrist.
This is perhaps not the easiest career move to make in medicine because psychiatry has traditionally been regarded as rather a “low rent” specialisation. I think this prejudice reflects
the historical fact that relatively little is yet known about the objective correlates of mental symptoms; but this is changing as neuroscience advances rapidly and techniques like brain imaging are applied
to an analysis of psychiatric disorders.
I was very fortunate to train in clinical practice and research methodology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where I was supported by the Wellcome Trust and worked closely with Prof Mick Brammer
and many other colleagues. We developed various statistical methods for computerised analysis of structural and functional magnetic resonance images of the brain.
The areas of application that have most interested me are schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders, psychopharmacological effects on brain function, and the integration of imaging and genetics.
I have been a Professor of Psychiatry in Cambridge since 1999. I have set up the Brain Mapping Unit here and I am director of functional MRI at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre; I am also a co-director
of CAMEO, a new clinical service for patients with early symptoms of psychosis.
I think the future generally looks bright for fundamental progress in our scientific understanding of the problems of psychiatry.”
Selected recent publications
Aron AR, Schlaghecken F, Fletcher PC, Bullmore ET, Eimer M, Barker R, Sahakian BJ, Robbins TW. (2003) Inhibition of subliminally primed responses is mediated by the caudate and thalamus: evidence from
functional MRI and Huntington's disease. Brain. 126(Pt 3):713-23.
Aron, AR, Fletcher PC, Bullmore ET, Sahakian BJ, Robbins TW. (2003) Stop-signal inhibition disrupted by damage to right inferior frontal gyrus in humans. Nat Neuroscience 6(2):115-6
Bullmore E, Suckling J, Zelaya F, Long C, Honey G, Reed L, Routledge C, Ng V, Fletcher P, Brown J, Williams SC. (2003) Practice and difficulty evoke anatomically and pharmacologically dissociable brain
activation dynamics. Cereb Cortex, 13(2):144-154
Honey GD, Suckling J, Zelaya F, Long C, Routledge C, Jackson S, Ng V, Fletcher PC, Williams SC, Brown J, Bullmore ET. (2003) Dopaminergic drug effects on physiological connectivity in a human cortico-striato-thalamic
system. Brain, in press.
Pantelis C, Velakoulis D, McGorry PD, Wood SJ, Suckling J, Phillips LJ, Yung AR, Bullmore ET, Brewer W, Soulsby B, Desmond P, McGuire PK. (2003) Neuroanatomical abnormalities before and after onset
of psychosis: a cross-sectional and longitudinal MRI comparison. Lancet 25;(361):281-8
Contact
E-mail: etb23@cam.ac.uk
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