Professor Gina Rippon is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. She is a past-President of the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience and, in 2015, was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association. Her research involves state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as dyslexia and autism. She also investigates the use of neuroscience techniques to explore social processes such as gender stereotyping and stereotype threat. She is an outspoken critic of ’neurotrash’, the populist (mis)use of neuroscience research to (mis)represent our understanding of the brain and, most particularly, to prop up outdated stereotypes. In her new book ‘The Gendered Brain’ (Bodley Head), she challenges the idea that there are two sorts of ‘hardwired’ brains’, male and female, and offers a 21st century model for better understanding of how brains get to be different.She works with organisations such as Speakers4Schools (http://www.speakers4schools.org/), regularly addressing secondary schools on issues associated with gender, science and the brain. As part of a European initiative to address gender inequalities in participation in science (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/promoting-gender-equality-research-and-innovation), she has given keynote addresses at conferences in France, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain and Switzerland.
