Irene Tracey is Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford and Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience. Irene and her team developed new approaches to uncover how the human brain constructs and modulates the perception of pain in health and disease. Pioneering the use of neuroimaging with novel paradigm designs, their work has given mechanistic insight into how injury, cognition, context and mood produce and influence the experience of pain in acute and chronic pain states. Their work has contributed to a fundamental change in how we view pain as an emergent experience that is not simply related to nociception and injury. Her team has also transformed our understanding of how anaesthetics produce altered states of consciousness. Their work spans discovery through translation to industry, the clinic and society.

Irene is currently President of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). She is a Fellow Royal College Anaesthetists (2009), Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2015), Member of the Academia Europaea (2020), Honorary Fellow of the Physiological Society (2022). She was awarded the Patrick Wall Medal (2009), the Feldberg Foundation Prize (2017) and the British Neuroscience Association’s Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience award (2018). In 2022, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).