Richard Morris
Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at The Wellcome Trust; Professor of Neuroscience, University of Edingburgh, Great Britain
Breaking the Wall of Research Funding. What Funding Can Do to Enable - and to Disrupt - Research Excellence.
Excellence, excellence, excellence – in a time where the talk of “excellence” in education and research is abundant, we need to ask about the challenges facing funders: under what conditions can different funding mechanisms help promote excellence – and when might these actually hinder breakthroughs? The neuroscientist Richard Morris (1948) has built his career examining the neural mechanisms of learning: twenty-five years ago, he devised what has come to be known as the “Morris Water Maze”. This is a key behavioural protocol for testing spatial memory in rodents that is widely used today to investigate the role of the hippocampus and other brain structures in the formation of spatial memories. Today, Morris works also at the Wellcome Trust, the largest medical charity for biomedical research in Great Britain, which awards over 600 million Pounds each year for innovative health-related research. As Head of the Department of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Morris oversees a wide portfolio, while also continuing his interest in how the latest advances in behavioural neuroscience can assist applied and translational projects in the realms of cognition, learning and memory.
