Robert Turner (scientist)
Encyclopedia
Robert Turner is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in brain physics and magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI). Coils inside every MRI scanner owe their shape to his ideas.
and Edith Turner, and brother of poet Frederick Turner
. He was born in Northamptonshire, England. He lived for several years in Zambia
before returning to England, completing his secondary education at Manchester Grammar School
.
He studied mathematics and physics at Cornell University
, NY, USA, from 1964–1968, graduating with a BA magna cum laude. He then went on to study physics at Simon Fraser University
, BC, Canada, and was awarded a PhD in 1973. For his PhD thesis, he invented and used a novel technique to measure the velocity of sound in molten metal alloys. He also completed a Post-graduate Diploma in Social Anthropology at University College London
between 1975 and 1977, and conducted field ethnographic research resulting in several publications.
Since 2006, Turner has been the director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
(MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(fMRI), which today is the most widely used method of brain mapping. In the 1980s, he worked with distinguished scientists including 2003 Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Mansfield
to produce a mathematical framework for MRI coil design which was crucial to the development of ultra-fast echoplanar imaging (EPI).,, This technique allows the recording of changes in blood flow in the brain associated with brain function and was crucial to the development of fMRI.
From 1988 until 1993 he worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health
in Bethesda, MD. Working with Denis le Bihan, a French neuroradiologist, he initially showed that EPI could be used to provide high quality maps of water diffusion in brain tissue, a discovery (known as Diffusion MRI
) which has led to the widespread clinical use of MRI in stroke, where water diffusion in the affected brain tissue drops very rapidly after the ischemic event. The technique also lies at the heart of diffusion tensor imaging, a method for non-invasive study of connecting pathways within the brain’s white matter.
In 1991, still at NIH, he was the first to show that EPI could be used to monitor the time course of oxygenation changes in animal brain resulting from changes in the breathing gas.,. This led to the discovery, made in collaboration with noted researcher Kenneth Kwong
that EPI could accurately track within seconds the local changes in blood oxygenation in human brain (BOLD
) caused by task-related neural activity. For the first time, human brain activity could thus be observed entirely non-invasively, using the natural contrast agent of deoxyhaemoglobin. In 1992, papers by Kwong et al. and Seiji Ogawa
et al. appeared, showing similar results demonstrating that BOLD contrast enables the mapping of activation patterns in the working human brain. These findings led to an explosion of interest in fMRI, which depends almost entirely on the use of EPI to investigate human brain function, and the subsequent development of what has come to be known as Imaging Neuroscience.
In 1993 he returned to the United Kingdom as a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow to become head of MRI at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
at University College London
, a position he held from 1993 to 2003. In 1994 he was awarded a professorship by University College London
.
Since 2006, he has been director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig. His work there centres on the quest to gain more precise knowledge of the structure and function of the human brain, by using more powerful MRI scanners and improved hardware and methodology. He also plays a role in the development of Neuroanthropology
, which brings together insights from the study of culture and the study of the brain.
Author of over 170 refereed articles in the fields of neurophysics, physics, anthropology and music, Turner has a Web of Science
h-index
of approximately 50, meaning he has authored a large number of highly-cited academic papers. His work has also resulted in several patents in the US and worldwide, and UK, for coils used in imaging.
Societies: International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (Fellow), Leipziger Neuromusik Gesprächskreis (Co-Director)
2005 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Fellow
1993–2003 Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor
1995 Thorsten Almen Prize (University of Munich)
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences is located Leipzig, Germany. The institute was founded in 2004 by a merger between the former Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich...
in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in brain physics and magnetic resonance imaging
Magnetic resonance imaging
Magnetic resonance imaging , nuclear magnetic resonance imaging , or magnetic resonance tomography is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures...
(MRI). Coils inside every MRI scanner owe their shape to his ideas.
Background
Robert Turner is the son of British cultural anthropologists Victor TurnerVictor Turner
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage...
and Edith Turner, and brother of poet Frederick Turner
Frederick Turner (poet)
is an American poet, polymath and academic. He is the author of two science fiction epic poems, The New World and Genesis, several books of poetry, and a number of scholarly works on topics ranging from beauty and the biological basis of artistic production and appreciation to complexity and Julius...
. He was born in Northamptonshire, England. He lived for several years in Zambia
Zambia
Zambia , officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west....
before returning to England, completing his secondary education at Manchester Grammar School
Manchester Grammar School
The Manchester Grammar School is the largest independent day school for boys in the UK . It is based in Manchester, England...
.
He studied mathematics and physics at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, NY, USA, from 1964–1968, graduating with a BA magna cum laude. He then went on to study physics at Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University is a Canadian public research university in British Columbia with its main campus on Burnaby Mountain in Burnaby, and satellite campuses in Vancouver and Surrey. The main campus in Burnaby, located from downtown Vancouver, was established in 1965 and has more than 34,000...
, BC, Canada, and was awarded a PhD in 1973. For his PhD thesis, he invented and used a novel technique to measure the velocity of sound in molten metal alloys. He also completed a Post-graduate Diploma in Social Anthropology at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
between 1975 and 1977, and conducted field ethnographic research resulting in several publications.
Since 2006, Turner has been the director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Academic achievements
Robert Turner is among a group of pioneering physicists who helped create magnetic resonance imagingMagnetic resonance imaging
Magnetic resonance imaging , nuclear magnetic resonance imaging , or magnetic resonance tomography is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures...
(MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...
(fMRI), which today is the most widely used method of brain mapping. In the 1980s, he worked with distinguished scientists including 2003 Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Mansfield
Peter Mansfield
Sir Peter Mansfield, FRS, , is a British physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging . The Nobel Prize was shared with Paul Lauterbur, who also contributed to the development of MRI...
to produce a mathematical framework for MRI coil design which was crucial to the development of ultra-fast echoplanar imaging (EPI).,, This technique allows the recording of changes in blood flow in the brain associated with brain function and was crucial to the development of fMRI.
From 1988 until 1993 he worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...
in Bethesda, MD. Working with Denis le Bihan, a French neuroradiologist, he initially showed that EPI could be used to provide high quality maps of water diffusion in brain tissue, a discovery (known as Diffusion MRI
Diffusion MRI
Diffusion MRI is a magnetic resonance imaging method that produces in vivo images of biological tissues weighted with the local microstructural characteristics of water diffusion, which is capable of showing connections between brain regions...
) which has led to the widespread clinical use of MRI in stroke, where water diffusion in the affected brain tissue drops very rapidly after the ischemic event. The technique also lies at the heart of diffusion tensor imaging, a method for non-invasive study of connecting pathways within the brain’s white matter.
In 1991, still at NIH, he was the first to show that EPI could be used to monitor the time course of oxygenation changes in animal brain resulting from changes in the breathing gas.,. This led to the discovery, made in collaboration with noted researcher Kenneth Kwong
Kenneth Kwong
Kenneth Kwong is an Associate Professor in radiology at Harvard Medical School. His work, along with that of Seiji Ogawa, was significant in the development of fMRI....
that EPI could accurately track within seconds the local changes in blood oxygenation in human brain (BOLD
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...
) caused by task-related neural activity. For the first time, human brain activity could thus be observed entirely non-invasively, using the natural contrast agent of deoxyhaemoglobin. In 1992, papers by Kwong et al. and Seiji Ogawa
Seiji Ogawa
Seiji Ogawa is a Japanese researcher best known for discovering the technique that underlies Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging . He determined that the contrast in blood oxygen levels can be mapped in magnetic resonance imaging, thus showing which areas of the brain respond to the brain's...
et al. appeared, showing similar results demonstrating that BOLD contrast enables the mapping of activation patterns in the working human brain. These findings led to an explosion of interest in fMRI, which depends almost entirely on the use of EPI to investigate human brain function, and the subsequent development of what has come to be known as Imaging Neuroscience.
In 1993 he returned to the United Kingdom as a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow to become head of MRI at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London is an interdisciplinary centre for neuroimaging research based in London, United Kingdom.Principal investigators working at the Centre include Professors Ray Dolan, Jon Driver, Richard Frackowiak,...
at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
, a position he held from 1993 to 2003. In 1994 he was awarded a professorship by University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
.
Since 2006, he has been director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig. His work there centres on the quest to gain more precise knowledge of the structure and function of the human brain, by using more powerful MRI scanners and improved hardware and methodology. He also plays a role in the development of Neuroanthropology
Neuroanthropology
Neuroanthropology is the study of culture and the brain. This field explores how new findings in the brain sciences help us understand the interactive effects of culture and biology on human development and behavior...
, which brings together insights from the study of culture and the study of the brain.
Author of over 170 refereed articles in the fields of neurophysics, physics, anthropology and music, Turner has a Web of Science
Web of Science
ISI Web of Knowledge is an academic citation indexing and search service, which is combined with web linking and provided by Thomson Reuters. Web of Knowledge coverage encompasses the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. It provides bibliographic content and the tools to access, analyze,...
h-index
H-index
The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications...
of approximately 50, meaning he has authored a large number of highly-cited academic papers. His work has also resulted in several patents in the US and worldwide, and UK, for coils used in imaging.
Memberships
Committees: Scientific Advisory Board, Brown University Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility, Brown University. Advisory Committee, Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. International Advisory Board, CEA, Orsay, Paris. Scientific Advisory Committee, Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, University of Edinburgh. External Advisory Committee, 7 T Facility, Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, Nottingham, UK. International Advisory Board, Grenoble Institute for Neuroscience, Grenoble, France. Professional Journals: Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (Associate Editor), Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine (Editorial Board), Frontiers in Neuroscience (Review Editor)Societies: International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (Fellow), Leipziger Neuromusik Gesprächskreis (Co-Director)
Awards
2009 Simon Fraser University Alumni Association Outstanding Achievement Award2005 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Fellow
1993–2003 Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor
1995 Thorsten Almen Prize (University of Munich)
Selected works
- Stehling, M. K., Turner, R., & Mansfield, P. (1991). Echo-planar imaging: magnetic resonance imaging in a fraction of a second. Science, 254, 43–50.
- Turner, R., Le Bihan, D., Moonen, C.T.W., Despres, D., & Frank J. (1991) Echo-planar time course MRI of cat brain deoxygenation changes. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 22, 159–166.
- Kwong, K. K., Belliveau, J. W., Chesler, D. A., Goldberg, I. E., Weisskoff, R. M., Poncelet, B. P., Kennedy, D. N., Hoppel, B. E., Cohen, M. S., Turner, R., Cheng. H-M., Brady, T. J., & Rosen, B. R. (1992). Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging of human brain activity during primary sensory stimulation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 89(12), 5675–5679.
- Turner, R., Jezzard, P., Wen, H., Kwong, K. K., Le Bihan, D., Zeffiro, .T, & Balaban, R. S., (1993). Functional mapping of the human visual cortex at 4 tesla and 1.5 tesla using deoxygenation contrast EPI. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 29, 277–279.
- Friston, K. F., Jezzard, P., & Turner, R., (1994). The analysis of functional MRI time series. Human Brain Mapping,1, 53–171.
- Karni, A., Meyer, G., Jezzard, P., Adams, M. M., Turner, R., & Ungerleider, L. G. (1995). Functional MRI evidence for adult motor plasticity during motor skill learning. Nature, 377, 155–158.
- Neville, H. J., Bavelier, D., Corina, D., Rauschecker, J. P., Karni, A., Lalwani, A., Braun, A., Clark, V., Jezzard, P., & Turner, R. (1998). Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: biological constraints and effects of experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 95, 922–929.
- Friston, K. J., Josephs, O., Rees, G., & Turner, R. (1998). Nonlinear event-related responses in fMRI. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 39,41–52.
- Allen, P. J., Josephs, O., & Turner, R. (2000). A method for removing imaging artefact from continuous EEG recorded during functional MRI. Neuroimage, 12, 230–9.
- Crinion, J., Turner, R., Grogan, A., Hanakawa, T., Noppeney, U., Devlin, J. T., Aso, T., Urayama, S., Fukuyama, H., Stockton, K., Usui, K., Green, D. W., & Price, C. J. (2006). Language control in the bilingual brain. Science, 312, 1537–40.
- Turner, R., & Whitehead, C. (2008). How collective representations can change the structure of the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies; 15, 43–57.
- Domínguez Duque, J. F., Turner, R., Lewis, E. D., & Egan, G. (2010). Neuroanthropology: a humanistic science for the study of the culture-brain nexus. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2–3),138-47. Epub 4 August 2009.
- Lohmann, G., Margulies, D. S., Horstmann, A., Pleger, B., Lepsien, J., Goldhahn, D., Schloegl, H., Stumvoll, M., Villringer, A., & Turner R. (2010). Eigenvector centrality mapping for analyzing connectivity patterns in FMRI data of the human brain. PLoS One, 5: e10232.