Professor Richard Frackowiak was born in London and studied medicine at the University of Cambridge where he first became interested in the neurosciences. He joined the Medical Research Council’s Cyclotron Unit at Hammersmith Hospital, London, in 1979, under Professor Terry Jones, who had just installed one of Britain’s first Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners.Professor Frackowiak has always worked in brain imaging and his particular focus has been on determing how the normal brain functions, and how individuals’ activities and environments collaborate to shape their brains. In 1995, as Professor of Cognitive Neurology at UCL’s Institute of Neurology, he established the Functional Imaging Laboratory (now the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging), developing new techniques for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In a now famous study, Professor Frackowiak and his team showed that in London taxi drivers, there was a connection between an area of the brain – the hippocampus – a
