Dr. Lorina Naci

Lorina Naci is Associate Professor, leader of the 'Consciousness and Cognition' group (www.lorinanaci.org), and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge as an International Cooke Fellow. Her work focuses on developing novel biomarkers of healthy and disordered cognition in brain-injured and ageing populations, including individuals with early Alzheimer's dementia. Her work has made ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of cognition and consciousness for individuals with severely limited motoric output, such as severely brain-injured, anaesthetised or advanced Alzheimer's Disease patients. For example, she has used neuroimaging to understand how consciousness emerges from the healthy brain and to detect conscious awareness in some severely brain-injured patients, who were clinically diagnosed to be in a vegetative state. Her recent work has enabled some of these individuals to communicate their thoughts to the outside world. Concurrently, she explores the medico-ethical and societal implications of these applications. Her research has been published in high-impact scientific journals and covered widely in the international media. She has held the L'Oréal for Women in Science Research Excellence Fellowship from Canada, and received the L'Oréal Foundation France and UNESCO International Rising Talent Award. Professor Naci is a member of the Governing Board of the Global Brain Health Institute, at Trinity College Dublin and the University of California San Francisco, USA. She is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Irish Research Council, the Provost's Award, China-Trinity fund, and Enterprise Ireland.

  AGEING   Biomedical Ethics   BRAIN AGEING   CLINICAL ANAESTHESIA   CONSCIOUSNESS   Dementia/ Alzheimer's Disease   disorders of consciousness   Functional neuroimaging   healthcare ethics and law   Minimally Conscious State   Neuroimaging   TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY   Vegetative state

In the last five years, I have been awarded €1.5 million in competitive funding and published 27 peer-reviewed papers, with a further 6 manuscripts under review. My research has been covered in scientific editorials (e.g., Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association) and the international media (Irish Times, Irish Independent, The BBC, Scientific American, The Times). My work has made ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of cognition and consciousness for vulnerable individuals with severely limited or unreliable motoric output. I was the first to develop a neuroimaging brain-computer interface using auditory attention (Naci et al. Annals of Neurology 2012) and found that a patient, who was clinically diagnosed as 'vegetative state' for 12 years, could correctly answer multiple questions by simply by attending to the word 'yes' or 'no' (Naci et al. Jama Neurology 2013). Subsequently, I showed that complex cognition in response to everyday events, could be decoded in single healthy individuals from brain activity (Naci et al. PNAS 2014; NeuroImage 2017), and demonstrated that a patient, clinically diagnosed as 'vegetative state' for 16 years, followed real-world events and felt emotion from moment to moment, similarly to healthy individuals. My work is being used to improve on the alarmingly high rates of misdiagnosis (~43%) and inform medical decision-making (Peterson et al. Neuroimage 2015). My translational work builds on my basic neuroscience studies on the brain mechanisms of conscious cognition (Naci et al. Scientific Reports 2018; MacDonald et al. Trends in Cognitive Science 2015; Naci et al., Journal of Neuroscience 2013). For this work, I have received the 'L'Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Rising Talent' award and my work was featured in the textbook 'Cognitive Psychology: connecting mind, research, and everyday experience' (5th edition E. Bruce Goldstein 2018). My current research programme investigates cognition and consciousness in diverse populations that cannot use their behaviour to communicate, such as anaesthetized individuals (Luppi et al. Communications Biology 2022; Nature Communications 2019), advanced AD patients (Huntley et al. 2021, Alzheimer's and Dementia), sleep (Fogel et al. 2022), and newborn infants (Hu et al. 2022, Brain Communications).