Professor Irene Tracey is currently Warden of Merton College, Oxford, her alma mater, which is one of Oxford’s oldest undergraduate and graduate colleges dating back to 1264. She is also Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (without Portfolio) at the University of Oxford.
Over the past 25 years her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception, pain relief and nociceptive processing within the injured and non-injured human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging techniques and novel paradigm designs. They have also been investigating the neural basis of altered states of consciousness induced by anaesthetic agents. Her work has both discovery and translational elements and has contributed to a fundamental change in how we view pain as an emergent experience not simply related to nociceptive inputs.