Rate My Professor Campbell Le Heron

Dr. Campbell Le Heron is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago, Christchurch, where he contributes to the Neurodegeneration Research Group. He also serves as a Consultant Neurologist in the Department of Neurology at the Canterbury District Health Board and as a Cognitive Neuroscientist at the New Zealand Brain Research Institute, both in Christchurch. Le Heron earned his MBChB from the University of Otago, followed by clinical experience as a doctor in Melbourne, Australia. He completed advanced Neurology training, including an ANZAN overseas fellowship at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, finishing in 2014. He then pursued a DPhil at the University of Oxford under Professor Masud Husain, investigating cognitive neurology, funded by the Christopher Welch Scholarship in Biological Sciences and the Clarendon Scholarship.

Le Heron's research centers on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of apathy—a profound disorder of motivation—in neurodegenerative and vascular disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and cerebral small vessel disease. His studies explore how disruptions in value-based decision-making, particularly the integration of rewards and effort costs, underlie these deficits, employing behavioral experiments, pupillary responses, functional and structural MRI, and other neuroimaging techniques. Notable publications include “Brain mechanisms underlying apathy” in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry (2018), “Dysfunctional effort-based decision-making underlies apathy in genetic cerebral small vessel disease” in Brain (2018), “Dopamine modulates dynamic decision-making during foraging” in the Journal of Neuroscience (2020), “A multi-step model of Parkinson’s disease pathogenesis” in Movement Disorders (2021), “Learning the value of experience” in Brain (2024), and “Understanding disrupted motivation in Parkinson’s disease through a value-based decision-making lens” in Trends in Neurosciences (2025). His contributions have earned him the 2024 Alzheimers NZ Fellowship and a 2019 Canterbury Medical Research Fund Major Project Grant. Through patient-centered research, Le Heron advances understanding of normal neural processes in motivation and goal-directed behavior.