Professor Geraint Rees
Telephone:
Email:
Location:
- University College Hospital
- National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
GMC/GDC number:
3557608
Professional background
Geraint Rees is a professor of cognitive neurology at University College London, where he directs the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
His research interests focus on understanding the neural basis of human consciousness in health and disease, using functional neuroimaging techniques in combination with other methodologies. Recently he has pioneered new approaches to analysing functional brain images to individuate the contents of consciousness, and has written and spoken on the potential moral and ethical implications of such techniques. His work has been internationally recognised by award of the Young Investigator Medal of the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping, the Experimental Psychology Prize; and he has given the Francis Crick lecture at the Royal Society and the Goulstonian lecture at the Royal College of Physicians. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
In addition to his research interests, Geraint has a track record of personal and professional commitment to improving clinical academic training both at UCL Partners and throughout the UK. He oversees the NIHR academic clinical fellow and clinical lecturer programmes across UCL Partners and is the lead for postgraduate education & training within the UCL/UCLH Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre and the UCL Faculty of Biomedical Sciences. Nationally, he is a member of the medical programme board for England, deputy chair of the BMA’s Medical academic staff committee, and a member of the MRC neurosciences & mental health board.
He actively contributes to development of national policy on clinical academic training.
Research interests
Interested in all disorders of consciousness, but primarily focus is on the research study of patients with disorders of awareness following focal brain injury such as stroke.
Publications
Ten key primary publications (from a selection of ~120):
1. Sterzer P, Haynes JD, Rees G. (2009) Fine-scale activity patterns in high-level visual areas encode the category of invisible objects. J Vision 8,10.1-12
2. Sterzer P, Rees G. (2008) A neural basis for percept stabilization in binocular rivalry. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20, 389-99
3. Weil RS, Haynes JDH, Kilner J & Rees G (2007). Neural correlates of perceptual filling-in of an artificial scotoma in humans. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104 ,5211-16
4. Haynes J-D, Deichmann R & Rees G. (2005) Eye-specific suppression in human LGN reflects perceptual dominance during binocular rivalry. Nature 438, 214-9
5. Haynes J-D & Rees G. (2005) Predicting the stream of consciousness from human visual cortex activity. Current Biology 15, 1301-1307 [see also Dispatches]
6. Haynes J-D & Rees G. (2005) Predicting the orientation of invisible stimuli from activity in human visual cortex. Nature Neuroscience 8, 686-91 [See also News & Views]
7. Rees G, Wojciulik E, Clarke K, Husain M, Frith CD & Driver J. (2000) Unconscious Activation of Visual Cortex in the Damaged Right Hemisphere of a Parietal Patient with Extinction. Brain 123 1624-1633
8. Rees G, Friston KJ, Koch C. (2000) A direct quantitative relationship between the functional properties of human and macaque V5. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 716-23 {See also News & Views}
9. Lumer E, Friston KJ, Rees G (1998) Neural Correlates of Perceptual Rivalry in the Human Brain. Science 280, 1930-3
10. Rees G, Frith CD and Lavie N (1997) Modulating irrelevant motion perception by varying the attentional load of an unrelated task. Science 278, 1616-9
Three key review publications:
1. Sterzer P, Kleinschmidt A, Rees G (2009). The neural bases of multistable perception. Trends Cogn Sci, 13, 310-8
2. Haynes JD & Rees G (2006) Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans. [review] Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7, 523-34
3. Rees G, Kreiman G, Koch C. (2002) Neural correlates of consciousness in humans [review]. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(4), 261-270