The brain series: The arts, creativity, and clinical science

Professor Hurlbert is Professor of Visual Neuroscience, Director of the Centre for Translational Systems Neuroscience and Dean of Advancement at Newcastle University, where she co-founded and directed the Institute of Neuroscience.

She trained as a physicist, physiologist, neuroscientist and physician, at Princeton, Harvard, MIT and Cambridge. Professor Hurlbert’s research focuses on human vision; she lectures widely on colour perception and art, and has devised and co-curated several science-based art exhibitions, including an interactive installation in the 2014 exhibition Making Colour at the National Gallery, where she was Scientist Trustee.

Dr David Bell is a past president of  the British Psychoanalytic Society. He is currently a consultant psychiatrist in the Adult Department of the Tavistock and Portman where he directs a specialist unit for serious/enduring complex disorders.

Dr. Bell lectures and publishes widely on various subjects including the historical development of psychoanalytic concepts , the  psychoanalytic understanding of severe disorder such as   psychosis and borderline states.  

Throughout his professional career he has been deeply involved in the relation between psychoanalysis and other disciplines, such as; literature, philosophy, culture and socio-political issues  and has published extensively  in these areas. Dr Bell is one of the UK's leading psychiatric experts in asylum and human rights .  

Professor Loveday has a specific focus on the nature of normal and impaired memory, in particular autobiographical memory. Her particular area of expertise lies in cognitive assessment and the use of cognitive profiling for the diagnosis and clinical management of hydrocephalus, Anorexia Nervosa, traumatic brain injury and dementia.

Professor Loveday has published papers across an eclectic range of other topics including the relationship between stress hormones and attachment in adolescence as well as the psychology of music.

Catherine is an active member of the BPS, as Deputy Chair to the Standing Conference Committee, a member of the editorial committee for The Psychologist and a member of the Research Board. She has a passion for public engagement with science, is regularly invited to give public lectures and has appeared as an expert psychologist in a number of television and radio programmes.

Professor Warren trained in neurology at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the National Hospital, Queen Square (FRACP 2000) and subsequently completed a PhD in the functional imaging of the human auditory brain at the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology (2005).

Professor Warren's research group uses complex sound as a paradigm to understand disordered information processing in neurodegenerative disease. Special interests include the progressive aphasias, auditory cognition in dementia and functional imaging of neurodegenerative diseases.