Three NIHR Imperial BRC Theme leads were elected to the Academy’s prestigious Fellowship in 2026, in recognition of their outstanding contributions to advancing medical science and improving health through discovery research, translational innovation and clinical impact.
Anne Lingford-Hughes is a Professor in Addiction Biology in the Department of Brain Sciences and a Consultant Psychiatrist at Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust. She is a co-lead for Brain Sciences theme. Her research uses neuroimaging and neuropharmacology to better understand the brain mechanisms underlying addiction to improve treatment outcomes with a focus on alcohol and opiate dependence. She also conducts proof-of-concept clinical trials to translate these findings into clinic.
Since 2023, she is Chair of the UK Government’s Addiction Healthcare Goals, Office for Life Sciences, whose aim is to improve treatment outcomes for those with drug and/or alcohol addiction through developing innovative approaches and research infrastructure. She trained in medicine at Oxford, completed her PhD at Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Professor Lingford-Hughes said: “I am very honoured and humbled to have been elected a Fellow to the Academy of Medical Sciences. This recognition is a reflection of the commitment and perseverance from many people I have worked with in addiction science to improve treatment outcomes and address the immense unmet needs. I would also like to thank everyone who has mentored me throughout my career. I look forward to contributing to the Academy’s important work, particularly in supporting and advancing careers in clinical academia and in addiction science.”
David Sharp, Brain Sciences theme co-lead, is a Professor of Neurology in the Department of Brain Sciences and Centre Director of UK DRI Centre for Care Research & Technology, where he focuses on harnessing technology to improve the lives of people living with dementia. He is also Scientific Director of the Imperial College Clinical Imaging Facilityand Associate Director of the Imperial Centre for Injury Studies.
His research uses cognitive neuroscience and advanced neuroimaging to investigate how brain injury and neurodegeneration affect brain network function, with a particular focus on memory and attention. He has explored how treatments for cognitive impairment can be personalised, and his current work centres on neurotechnology development for dementia and traumatic brain injury.
Professor Sharp said: “I am honoured to have been elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences, and I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the many outstanding researchers with whom I have had the privilege to work. Our research has focused on understanding the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury, its relationship to neurodegenerative disease, and the use of new technologies in dementia care. The work is translational and human-focused, so I would also like to thank the people affected by these conditions who have participated in our research and who continue to work closely with us today.”
James Ware is Professor of Cardiovascular and Genomic Medicine at Imperial’s National Heart and Lung Institute and Cardiovascular theme co-lead. His research brings together human genetics, molecular cardiology, and precision medicine to understand the impact of genetic variation on the heart and circulation, and to use genome information to improve patient care. His work has helped define the genetic basis of cardiomyopathies and arrhythmia syndromes, improving how genetic variants are interpreted, and accelerating the integration of whole-genome sequencing, rare variant discovery and polygenic risk into routine cardiovascular care.
Alongside his Imperial role, he leads the Cardiovascular Genomics and Precision Medicine Group at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences. He also serves as an honorary Consultant Cardiologist at Royal Brompton and Hammersmith Hospitals, where he specialises in the diagnosis and management of inherited cardiac conditions.
“I am delighted and honoured to have been elected as a Fellow. The fellowship comprises many individuals whom I admire and respect professionally and personally, and it is a great privilege to be elected to join them and work with them. I am also very mindful that impactful medical science is team science, and this distinction recognises the contributions of dozens of exceptionally talented and dedicated team members and collaborators.
Importantly, as one of the national academies, the Academy of Medical Sciences is a working organisation with a mission to create an open and progressive research sector and improve health in the UK and beyond. I look forward to working with colleagues to support academic career development opportunities, to create a sustainable research environment that allows a diversity of researchers to flourish, and to advance health and improve lives.”
Mental health conditions — depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction — affect an estimated one billion people worldwide, and for many of them, conventional treatments simply do not work well enough. Roughly one in three people with depression fails to respond adequately to standard antidepressants, and there is a pressing, unmet clinical need for something genuinely different.
Psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has been generating serious scientific excitement. A daily pill to manage symptoms, appears to catalyse lasting psychological change from just one or two supported sessions. But until now, nobody had properly documented what it actually does to the human brain.
A new study recently published by researchers at Imperial College London and UCSF is providing insight on the subject. It is the first of its kind study to track what a single dose of psilocybin does to the brains of people who have never taken a psychedelic before. The study was supported by the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre (NIHR Imperial BRC) under Brain Sciences Theme and was covered on the day of publication by both The Guardian and Scientific American.
Twenty-eight healthy volunteers each received 1mg of psilocybin which was small enough to be considered a placebo. One month later each participants received a full 25 mg dose. This second dose was sufficient to produce an intense psychedelic experience that 27 of the 28 rated the most unusual state of consciousness of their entire lives.
During the experiment, the brain’s electrical activity became dramatically richer and more unpredictable — a phenomenon scientists call brain entropy. The bigger this surge, the more psychological insight participants reported the next day, and the better their wellbeing and mental flexibility a month later. This is an important finding in its own right: it helps clarify that the psychedelic experience itself, rather than just the drug’s chemistry, is the engine of therapeutic change — something that has direct implications for how psilocybin-assisted therapy should be designed and delivered.
Most strikingly, MRI scans taken a month after the high dose revealed apparent changes to the physical structure of nerve fibre bundles connecting the front of the brain to deeper regions — the tracts appeared denser and more tightly organised, the opposite of what is typically seen in ageing and dementia. Whether this reflects genuine rewiring of the human brain remains to be confirmed in larger studies, but it raises the tantalising possibility that psilocybin’s reach could extend beyond mental health to neurodegenerative conditions.
The FDA has already recognised psilocybin’s potential by granting it Breakthrough Therapy designation for both treatment-resistant and major depression. This study sheds light on the biological scaffolding to explain why it works — and that matters enormously, both for convincing regulators and for designing treatments that are as safe and effective as possible. It has the potential to address the current shortfall in effective therapy for the more than one billion people worldwide living with mental health conditions.
Full paper: Lyons T et al. Nature Communications 17, 3977 (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71962-3
