Professor Irene Tracey is FENS President (2022-2024) and Vice Chancellor at the University of Oxford. She is a former Warden of Merton College, Oxford, as well as Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience and Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She did her undergraduate and graduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, where she focused her research on the early use of magnetic resonance imaging methods to study disease mechanisms in humans. Subsequent to a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, she was a founding member of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and was its director from 2005 until 2015.

Alongside senior leadership roles within the University, Irene has served and continues to serve on many national and international committees, such as the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), British Neuroscience Association, the Lundbeck Brain Prize Committee and by appointment of the government, the UK Medical Research Council.

She is a passionate advocate for women in science and is involved in several mentorship schemes. Over the past 25 years, her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception, pain relief and nociceptive processing within the injured and non-injured human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging techniques and novel paradigm designs. They have also been investigating the neural basis of altered states of consciousness induced by anaesthetic agents.

Patricia Gaspar is an Emeritus researcher of INSERM (Institut pour la Santé et la Recherche Médicale), working at the Paris Brain Institute. She trained as an MD in neurology and neuropathology (1983), and obtained a PhD in neuropharmacology from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris (1985). She obtained a full-time research position at the INSERM  as group leader and then laboratory director at the Salpêtrière Hospital. She co-headed the Institut du Fer à Moulin (2007-2012) and directed the Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris (2010-14). The main aim of her research has been to better our understanding of the developmental basis of neuropsychiatric disorders. She has largely focused on the developmental role of serotonin (5-HT). Among the current research themes in the laboratory are projects aimed to identify mechanisms the role of 5-HT in parental behavior and early life stress.

She had the opportunity to work 2 years abroad: as MD in Tunisia, (Center of Neurology of Tunis :1979-1980) and as a visiting professor in the US (Jon Kaas laboratory, University of Vanderbilt: 1990-91). Throughout her career, she been involved in a number of general interest tasks for evaluation of research in France and abroad.

Liset M de la Prida graduated in Physics in 1994 and received her PhD
from the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante in 1998. After
postdoctoral training with Richard Miles in Paris she became Lab
Director at the Instituto Cajal in 2008. She was honored as the Best
Graduate Student and awarded the PhD Extraordinary Prize, and has earned
prestigious fellowships and grants from EMBO, HFSP and the European
Commission under different framework programs. The main goal of her
lab is to understand the function of hippocampal and para-hippocampal
circuits. She is a leading international expert in the study of the
basic mechanisms of physiological ripples and epileptic fast ripples,
with strong visibility as developer of novel groundbreaking
electrophysiological tools. Dr. de la Prida serves as an Editor for
specialized journals including Journal of Neuroscience Methods and
eNeuro, and has commissioning duties in the American Epilepsy Society
(Task Force Working Groups) and the Spanish Society of Neuroscience.