Alan Cowey spent over 40 years at the University of Oxford, where he was involved in many initiatives and served on many committees, playing many important roles in the development of neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field of research.
After his undergraduate and doctoral training at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Larry Weiskrantz, Alan had served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester (USA) and Cambridge before moving to Oxford in 1967. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1988 and and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998.
Alan played a pivotal role in setting up the MSc in Neuroscience course and for setting up the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Building, which has now become a central hub of the Oxford Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, our own department and the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity.
Alan's primary interest was in the way we interpret the visual world. This led him to study not only the early visual areas, but also the inferotemporal and parietal cortex with which they are connected and the further projections into the eye field in the prefrontal cortex. His research interests were wide, covering colour vision, attention, visual neglect and the anatomical basis of visual abilities that can be spared after a lesion in the primary visual cortex.
