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. Professor Naci's recent work has enabled some patients, who met all the internationally agreed criteria for the clinical diagnosis of 'vegetative state' to communicate their thoughts to the outside world. Concurrently, she explores the medico-ethical and societal implications of these applications. She is recipient of prestigious funding awards from the Health Research Board of Ireland (2024) and the Science Foundation Ireland (2024). She has held the L'Oréal for Women in Science Research Excellence Fellowship from Canada (2016), and received the L'Oréal Foundation France and UNESCO International Rising Talent Award (2017). 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 the Health Research Board of Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, Wellcome Trust, the Irish Research Council, the Provost's Award, China-Trinity fund, Enterprise Ireland, etc. Professor Naci's work has had significant impacts, including scientific, societal, policy and professional practice and economic. It has been published in leading international journals, including Science Advances (2023), Nature Communications (2024), Journal of the American Medical Association (2024), Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2024), Brain Communications (2024), etc. It is routinely featured in academic textbooks (e.g., 'Cognitive Psychology'; 5th edition E. Bruce Goldstein 2018) and has been featured in Wikipedia"s `Science Highlights of 2023", and editorials in the Science and Nature journals. Three articles published in the last 12 months (Bayne et al. 2023; Deng et al. 2023; Luppi et al. 2023), two senior-authored (Bayne et al. 2023; Deng et al. 2023), are at the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.com, ranking in the 97-99 percentile of all articles of the same age internationally, for their outstanding attention scores, with 70% of downloads being from members of the public. Bayne et al. Naci (2023) had over 100 mentions in publications all round the world, reaching a readership of 115 million worldwide. Professor Naci's work has attracted the attention of the media globally (> 200 unique news stories) and she is actively engaged in the public communication of science. Most recently, she spoke to Drive Time on RTE1 on brain health effects of contact sports (Dec 2024). Her recent interview with `Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea", Newsnight"s flagship science program, aired on August 11th, 2024. In January 2024, she was hosted in the studio of Albanian Primetime TV for a 1-hour long feature interview. Professor Naci has given interviews and been featured in The Irish Times, Irish Examiner, The New Scientist, The Daily Mail, BBC World Service, Macleans, The Verge, Brazil Post, NBC News, The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, Radio Canada International, Fox News, Corriere della Sera, The Daily Mail, CTV News, The Huffington Post, Reuters, The Agenda with Steve Parkin, The Chicago Tribune, The Toronto Sun, Global News, Newswise, Medpage Today, Nature, and Science. Her work was profiled in the Irish Times (March 2021) article "Does the key to consciousness lie within our brains?"

  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 two years, Professor Naci has obtained as lead PI €995,990 in competitive grant funding, including the HRB Investigator-Led Project Award (PI; €447,390; 2024), and the Alzheimer's Society UK Project Award (Co-PI; £399,603; 2024). She is currently leading a €31,5 million application for a Research Centre called `Optimizing Brain Health Across the Lifespan (TITAN)", to the Research Ireland Centres Programme. Her SFI `Frontiers for the Future Award" application (PI, €1 million), received a `fundable' score, with the decision outcome forthcoming in December, 2024. In the last two years, she has published 37 peer-reviewed papers, with an additional 11 pre-prints in peer-review, in leading international journals. Professor Naci has pioneered ground-breaking work that detected consciousness in individuals considered to be in a 'vegetative state.' She was the first to pioneer a neuroimaging brain-computer interface using auditory attention (Naci et al. 2012;2013;2014;2016;2017;2022). She discovered that several patients, clinically diagnosed as `vegetative state' for over 12 years, could correctly answer multiple questions by simply attending to the word `yes" or `no". Her work has enabled some individuals, who were thought to be unconscious for several years, to communicate with their families. The impact of the work of Professor Naci and her collaborators is apparent in a change of clinical practice guidelines by the American Academy of Neurology (2018) and the European Academy of Neurology (2020), recommending that neuroimaging be used to help determine clinical diagnosis in the absence of behavioural evidence of consciousness. Additionally, her work was featured in several (7) international policy guidelines. E.g., by the UK Parliament Research Briefings (07/2022; Naci and Owen, 2013), by the German Working Group of Scientific Medical Societies (2023; Graham et al. 2018), and by the Government of Catalonia (2023; Abladmalak et al. 2023) among others. Her recent senior-authored article Deng et al. (2023) was featured on the front page of `Anaesthesiology News", the most widely read publication for the specialty for the last 25 years, and delivered free of charge to all 56,181 anaesthesiologists and anaesthesiology residents in the USA. Professor Naci"s work has also been cited in several (9) USA patents on brain- and human-computer interfaces and devices that monitor treatment compliance. Professor Naci is the lead PI the Dublin site of PREVENT-Dementia, the world's largest study investigating the origins and early diagnosis of dementia. As a Member of the Steering Group of the `PREVENT Dementia International Consortium', she has have facilitated the training of over 22 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows across the five study sites, over 40 publications in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, and €2.5 million in additional grant funding to the consortium.