Rate My Professor Irene Tracey

Professor Irene Tracey is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Sir George Radda, with research focused on the early use of magnetic resonance imaging methods to study disease mechanisms in humans. She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at Harvard Medical School at the MGH-NMR imaging centre. In 1997 she returned to Oxford as a founding member of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, now the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, serving as its director from 2005 to 2015.

Professor Tracey was tenured in 2001 in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and held a fellowship at Christ Church. From 2007 to 2019 she was Nuffield Chair in Anaesthetic Sciences with a fellowship at Pembroke College and served as Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences from 2015 to 2019. She became Vice-Chancellor on 1 January 2023. Her research over more than twenty-five years has advanced understanding of pain perception, analgesia and nociceptive processing in the human central nervous system through advanced neuroimaging, as well as the neural basis of altered states of consciousness induced by anaesthetic agents. She has supervised more than thirty-five DPhil students and many postdoctoral fellows. Her honours include election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023, Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, and the triennial Patrick Wall Medal from the Royal College of Anaesthetists in 2008.

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