Rate My Professor Kevin Murphy

Professor Kevin Murphy is Professor of Cerebrovascular Neuroimaging in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University, where he heads the Brain Imaging Group and serves as Compute and Data Lead at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC). He earned a BA in Theoretical Physics, an MSc in High Performance Computing, and a PhD in Neuroimaging Methods from Trinity College Dublin in 2005. After his PhD, he held a postdoctoral position at the Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, until 2008. That year, he joined CUBRIC on a Pfizer-sponsored project to improve pharmacological fMRI interpretability. From 2010 to 2015, he was supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship, focusing on physiological confounds in fMRI, breath-hold techniques for oxygen consumption quantification, and cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) in clinical populations. Since September 2016, he has held a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship to develop fMRI tools for evaluating brain vascular health in ageing and disease.

Murphy's research centers on cerebrovascular neuroimaging, creating methods to measure CVR, cerebral autoregulation, oxygen extraction fraction (OEF), and cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2), while addressing physiological noise in fMRI to isolate neural signals. His group has linked blood pressure fluctuations to BOLD signals, demonstrated neurovascular coupling dependence on baseline cerebral blood flow, and shown neural-vascular networks as functional units using fMRI and MEG. Ongoing projects include integrated MRI for microvascular and metabolic mapping in brain diseases such as stroke, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and Huntington's Disease, as well as vascular effects in gender-affirming hormone therapy and menstrual cycle perfusion changes. Notable publications include 'Towards a consensus regarding global signal regression for resting state functional connectivity MRI' (NeuroImage, 2017), 'Resting-state fMRI confounds and cleanup' (NeuroImage, 2013), 'Breath-hold BOLD fMRI without CO2 sampling enables estimation of venous cerebral blood volume' (NeuroImage, 2024), and 'Cerebrovascular function in women with polycystic ovary syndrome' (Clinical Endocrinology, 2025). He supervises PhD students, including Rik Khot, and co-edited the opening editorial for Imaging Neuroscience (2023).