Professor Clare Elwell
Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, UCL.
Clare Elwell is a Professor of Medical Physics at University College London (UCL) and Vice Dean for Impact for UCL Engineering. She develops functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technologies to image the human brain and her research projects include studies of acute brain injury, infant brain development, autism, migraine and malaria. She currently leads the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project which delivered the first brain images of infants in Africa. In 2023 she was awarded a Brocher Foundation Fellowship to investigate the responsible use of neuroimaging in disorders of consciousness.
Clare is Past President of the International Society on Oxygen Transport to Tissue and hosted the 42nd Annual Meeting of the society in 2014 at UCL. Clare is also past President of the Society for Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy. She is current President of the London International Youth Science Forum. She was a 2018 British Science Association Media Fellow at the Financial Times and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. She is Founder and Trustee of the charity Young Scientists for Africa. She has won numerous awards for research, teaching and public engagement and is currently the academic lead for the UCL Festival of Engineering.
Transforming How, When and Where We Can Image Oxygen in the Brain
At my first ISOTT meeting in Curacao in 1991 I delivered a short presentation on the use of a relatively new cerebral oxygenation monitoring technology, near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), to deliver non invasive measures of cerebral blood flow and cerebral blood volume in healthy adults. At the following ISOTT meeting in Mainz in 1992, Arno Villringer presented the first study using NIRS to measure functional brain activation which heralded the advent of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a brain imaging tool.
Since then the portable, non invasive and low cost benefits of fNIRS has transformed our ambitions for how, when and where we can image the brain.
Engineering innovations have enabled NIRS images of brain oxygen metabolism to be acquired in infants and adults. NIRS studies of the developing brain are paving the way for early markers of autism and studies in toddlers. And following its successful implementation in resource poor settings, NIRS is now an important brain imaging tool in global health studies.
During this talk I will discuss the multidisciplinary projects, many inspired by discussions at ISOTT meetings, which have driven forward the impact of NIRS studies on our understanding of the human brain.