Woman of the Week – Susan Greenfield

Susan Adele Greenfield, known also as Baroness Greenfield, wears many hats. She’s a British scientist, writer, broadcaster, and member of the House of Lords. Her work has focused mostly on the treatment and knowledge of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

She was born in 1950 in Hammersmith, London. Her mother was a dancer and her father an electrician. She excelled in school and was the first member of her immediate family to go to university. She was initially planning to go to St. Hilda’s College for philosophy and psychology. However, she changed her mind and graduated with a degree in experimental psychology.

She went on to complete research fellowships and graduate studies. Her research focused mostly on the brain, specifically how the brain behaves on people with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. She has written 200-plus papers in peer-reviewed journals on her research, many focusing on basic brain functions related to addiction and reward and the effects of dopamine and other neurochemicals.

In 1994, she was the first woman invited to give the Royal Institution Lectures, sponsored at the time by the BBC. She gave a speech titled “Journey to the centre of the brain,” and people were so impressed with it that she was appointed director of the Royal Institution. However, the group fell on hard financial times and was later abolished.

She spent the years after giving lectures and taking on more fellowships. Between 2004-05 she was Adelaide, Australia’s Thinker in Residence, someone who was a leader in her field and could help the government find solutions to problems. Her recommendations helped establish a Royal Institute here as well as a science media center.

In 2013, she co-founded a biotech company called Neuro-bio Ltd. This company works to develop diagnostic tests and therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease. They raised about $4 million in 2017 and continue to do work today.

In addition to this work, she is also known as someone who brings science to the forefront of conversations through her various talks.

She has written and spoken extensively about her thoughts on modern technology like video games and social media, their impact on child development and how they factor into autistic-like behavior, in her opinion/research.

She has coined the phrase “Mind Change” with inspiration from a term many are familiar with: climate change. She uses the term to umbrella all her work relating to how technology changes the brain and how we think and act now and for years to come.

Just last month, she was interviewed by The Telegraph. She noted that social media is creating a generation of children with the mental and emotional immaturity of three-year-olds. She liked social media “likes” to behavior a toddler exudes when needing instant gratification.

She also noted children are losing the ability to think independently and their communication skills are lacking.

She’s also noted that Public Health England has related social media and games to “lower levels of wellbeing” and felt it points to a “dose-response” relationship. She’s often been critiqued for her thoughts on this matter. Some fellow scientists say she made these assumptions with no scientific evidence. But, she pointed them to her work and others’ works in several peer-reviewed journals – specifically “Mind Change,” which is a collection of numerous peer-reviewed studies on the matter.

Greenfield is currently a senior research fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University.