Rosalind Ridley is a British psychologist and researcher who was head of the Medical Research Council Comparative Cognition Research Team in the Department of Psychology, Cambridge, UK, until 2005. She was a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1995–2010 and Vice-Principal from 2000–2005. She holds the privileges of a Fellow Emerita at Newnham College.
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. Ridley was involved in early work on transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, 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 and scrapie to primates and argued that the evidence for BSE 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 Ridley's current research lies in aspects of cognitive psychology to be found in late nineteenth and early twentieth century books for children, especially the works of J. M. Barrie.
Personal life
In 1981, Ridley married her colleague Harry Baker. She is a member of the Cambridge Drawing Society and the Cambridge District Art Circle
Select bibliography
Fatal Protein. The story of CJD, BSE and other prion diseases Ridley, R. M. and Baker, H. F. Oxford University Press.
Prion Diseases Baker, H. F. and Ridley, R. M. Eds. Humana Press Inc., Totowa, New Jersey.
Peter Pan and the Mind of J. M. Barrie. An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness Ridley, R. M. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
