Background
Rosalind Mary Ridley was born in 1949 in Coventry, United Kingdom and educated at Barr"s Hill Grammar School, Coventry and Newnham College, Cambridge University.
Rosalind Mary Ridley was born in 1949 in Coventry, United Kingdom and educated at Barr"s Hill Grammar School, Coventry and Newnham College, Cambridge University.
After reading Natural Sciences in Cambridge, majoring in Psychology, she studied for her Doctor of Philosophy at the Institute of Psychiatry, London under the supervision of Professor George Ettlinger.
She was a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1995 – 2010 and Vice-Principal from 2000-2005. She now holds the Privileges of a Fellow Emerita at Newnham College. Her current interests include art and painting.
In 1977, she joined the Medical Council, working in the Department of Psychiatry, Clinical Centre, Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, London and, in 1994, moved to the Department of Psychology, Cambridge University as Head of the Medical Council"s Comparative Cognition External Scientific Staff Team.
Rosalind Ridley"s research career started with an investigation into cortical mechanisms of visual perception followed by the delineation of the cortical areas involved in somatosensory discrimination learning. Her early career involved work on the role of dopamine in cognitive perseveration and motor stereotypy, but her interests then extended to the role of the hippocampus in simple and conditional learning.
Much of her research effort was directed towards developing treatments for Alzheimer"s disease, Parkinson"s disease and Huntington"s disease. She, and her research collaborators, demonstrated that acetylcholine was crucial for various types of memory formation and established that transplantation of neural tissue into the brain could restore memory and learning ability.
She also maintained an interest in the genetics of neurodegenerative diseases.
Rosalind Ridley was involved in early work on transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (subsequently known as prion disease), particularly in the recognition that individual cases of human prion disease could be sporadic, familial or acquired and that familial cases were associated with mutations in the prion protein gene. She demonstrated the transmissibility of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Biosystems Engineering ) and scrapie to primates and argued that the evidence for Biosystems Engineering and scrapie being acquired by maternal transmission was also compatible with genetic susceptibility to disease. In experiments using data extending over 25 years, she demonstrated that the amyloid proteins found in Alzheimer"s disease were self-assembling and experimentally transmissible, establishing a link in pathogenesis between prion diseases and the other neurodegenerative proteinopathies Seeing 2008 Blurb tore Percepts 2010 Blurb tore Making Images 2012 Blurb tore Just Looking 2016 Blurb tore.
She is a member of the Cambridge Drawing Society and the Cambridge District Art Circle.