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

Since my last promotion 2.6 years ago, I have obtained as lead PI €995,990 in competitive grant funding, including the HRB Investigator-Led Project Award (PI; €351,638; 2024), and the Alzheimer"s Society UK Project Award (Co-PI; £399,603; 2024). In 2023, I led a €31,5 million application for a Centre called `Optimizing Brain Health Across the Lifespan (TITAN)", to the SFI Research Centres Programme (outcome pending). My SFI `Frontiers for the Future Award" application (PI, €1 million), received a `fundable" score, with the decision outcome forthcoming in December, 2024. In this time, I have published 34 peer-reviewed papers, with an additional 11 pre-prints in peer-review, in leading international journals. I have pioneered ground-breaking work that detected consciousness in individuals considered to be in a "vegetative state." I was the first to pioneer a neuroimaging brain-computer interface using auditory attention (Naci et al. 2012;2013;2014;2016;2017;2022). I 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". My work has enabled some individuals, who were thought to be unconscious for several years, to communicate with their families. This work has led to a change in clinical practice guidelines by the American Academy of Neurology (2018) and the European Academy of Neurology (2020), recommending neuroimaging be used in clinical diagnosis in the absence of behavioural evidence of consciousness. I am also 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", I have facilitated the training of over 22 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows across the five study sites, over 35 publications in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, and €2.5 million in additional grant funding to the consortium.