Robert Turner (scientist)

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.

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,[17] a position he held from 1993 to 2003. In 1994 he was awarded a professorship by University College London.[18] From 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.[19] He 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.[20]

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.

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.

Robert Turner is among a group of pioneering physicists who helped create magnetic resonance imaging (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.

He studied mathematics and physics at Cornell University 1964–1968, graduating with a BA magna cum laude. He then went on to study physics at Simon Fraser University 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 academic publications.