18 Facts About Adrian Owen

Adrian Mark Owen was born on 17 May 1966 and is a British and Canadian neuroscientist and best-selling author.

Adrian Owen is best known for his 2006 discovery, published in the journal Science, showing that some patients thought to be in a vegetative state are in fact fully aware and able to communicate with the outside world using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Adrian Owen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2024.

Adrian Owen was born 17 May 1966 in Gravesend, Kent, England, and educated at Gravesend Grammar School, graduating in the same final year class as actor Paul Ritter and businessman Alex Beard.

Adrian Owen completed his PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London between 1988 and 1992.

In 1992, Adrian Owen began his postdoctoral research in the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, working with Michael Petrides and Brenda Milner.

Adrian Owen was awarded The Pinsent Darwin Scholarship by the University of Cambridge in 1996 and returned to the UK to work at the newly opened Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, Cambridge.

Adrian Owen was awarded MRC tenure in 2000 and made Assistant Director of the MRC CBU in 2005, with overall responsibility for the onsite imaging facilities.

In 2010, Adrian Owen was awarded a $10M Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at The University of Western Ontario and moved most of his research team to Canada in order to take up this position in January 2011.

In October 2019 Adrian Owen was the guest for the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific.

Adrian Owen's work has appeared in many of the world's most prestigious scientific and medical journals, including Science, Nature, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Adrian Owen has an h-index of 123 according to Google Scholar.

In November 2011, Adrian Owen led a study that was published in a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal, The Lancet.

In 2009, Adrian Owen launched Cambridge Brain Sciences, a web-based platform for healthcare providers and the wider scientific community to assess cognitive function using scientifically proven tests of memory, attention, reasoning and planning.

In June 2017, Adrian Owen published Into The Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death a popular science book that told the story of his 20-year quest to show that some patients thought to be in a vegetative state were in fact entirely aware, but incapable of indicating their awareness to the outside world.

Adrian Owen lives in London, Ontario with his wife, Emily Nichols who is a Neuroscientist, and has one son, Jackson.

Adrian Owen's sister, Frances Walsh is a Safeguarding Nurse for the NHS, in Warwickshire, England.

Adrian Owen's brother is a Physics Professor at University College London.