Robert Turner (scientist)
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Robert Turner is a British neuroscientist, physicist, and social anthropologist. He has been a director and professor at the
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences is located in 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 ...
in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in brain physics and
magnetic resonance imaging Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio wave ...
(MRI). Coils inside every MRI scanner owe their shape to his ideas.


Background

Robert Turner is the son of British cultural anthropologist
Victor Turner Victor Witter Turner (28 May 1920 – 18 December 1983) was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as ...
and Edith Turner, and brother of poet Frederick Turner. He was born in Northamptonshire, England. He lived for several years in
Zambia Zambia (), officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa, although it is typically referred to as being in Southern Africa at its most cent ...
before returning to England, completing his secondary education at
Manchester Grammar School The Manchester Grammar School (MGS) in Manchester, England, is the largest independent school (UK), independent day school for boys in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1515 as a Grammar school#free tuition, free grammar school next to Manchester C ...
. He studied mathematics and physics at
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
1964–1968, graduating with a BA ''
magna cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some So ...
''. He then went on to study physics at
Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located from ...
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 , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...
between 1975 and 1977, and conducted field ethnographic research resulting in several academic publications. Between 2006 and his retirement in 2014, Turner was the director of the Department of Neurophysics, which he established 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 imaging Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio wave ...
(MRI) and
functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
(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 Sir Peter Mansfield (9 October 1933 – 8 February 2017) was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Mansfie ...
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 The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
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-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI or DW-MRI) is the use of specific MRI sequences as well as software that generates images from the resulting data that uses the diffusion of water molecules to generate contrast in MR images. It ...
) 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 Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI or DW-MRI) is the use of specific MRI sequences as well as software that generates images from the resulting data that uses the diffusion of water molecules to generate contrast in MR images. It ...
, 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 Kin Man Kwong is a Hong Kong-born American nuclear physicist. He is a pioneer in human brain imaging. He received his bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to receive his P ...
that EPI could accurately track within seconds the local changes in blood oxygenation in human brain (
BOLD In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech. Methods and use The most common methods in W ...
) 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 (小川 誠二 ''Ogawa Seiji'', born January 19, 1934) is a Japanese biophysicist and neuroscientist known for discovering the technique that underlies Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). He is regarded as the father of moder ...
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, 7a position he held from 1993 to 2003. In 1994 he was awarded a professorship by University College London. 8From 2006 until his retirement in 2014, he was director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig. His work there centred 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. 9He continues to explore the implications for neuroscience and brain modelling of this improved knowledge, and he also contributes to the development of Neuroanthropology, which brings together insights from the study of culture and the study of the brain. 0 Author of over 280 refereed articles in the fields of neurophysics, physics, anthropology and music, Turner has a Web of Science h-index of over 70, 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, 122] 324] 5and UK, 627] 829] for coils used in imaging. 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

*2020 Gold Medal of the
International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine The International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine is a "multi-disciplinary nonprofit association that promotes innovation, development, and application of magnetic resonance techniques in medicine and biology throughout the world". The ...
*2009 Simon Fraser University Alumni Association Outstanding Achievement Award *2005 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Fellow *1995 Thorsten Almen Prize (University of Munich) *1993–2003 Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor


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 Sciences 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. * Jones DK, Knösche TR, Turner R. White matter integrity, fiber count, and other fallacies: the do's and don'ts of diffusion MRI. Neuroimage. 2013 Jun;73:239-54 * Stüber C, Morawski M, Schäfer A, Labadie C, Wähnert M, Leuze C, Streicher M, Barapatre N, Reimann K, Geyer S, Spemann D, Turner R. Myelin and iron concentration in the human brain: a quantitative study of MRI contrast. Neuroimage. 2014 Jun;93 Pt 1:95-106 * Waehnert MD, Dinse J, Weiss M, Streicher MN, Waehnert P, Geyer S, Turner R, Bazin PL. Anatomically motivated modeling of cortical laminae. Neuroimage. 2014 Jun;93 Pt 2:210-20. * Turner R. Uses, misuses, new uses and fundamental limitations of magnetic resonance imaging in cognitive science. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 2016 B371:20150349. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0349 * Turner R, De Haan D. Bridging the gap between system and cell: The role of ultra-high field MRI in human neuroscience. Prog Brain Res. 2017;233:179-220


References


External links


Robert Turner's Personal Page at the Max Planck Institute


{{DEFAULTSORT:Turner, Robert 1946 births Living people Academics of University College London Alumni of University College London British anthropologists British neuroscientists British physicists Cornell University alumni Max Planck Society people People educated at Manchester Grammar School People from Northamptonshire Simon Fraser University alumni Social anthropologists Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellows