Adrian M. Owen OBE, FRS, FRSC, FCAHS, PhD is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He has formally served as co-Chair of the CIFAR Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program (2014-2025), the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at Western (2010-2018), and Assistant Director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge (2000-2010). His research combines structural and functional neuroimaging with neuropsychological studies of brain-injured patients and has been published in many of the world’s leading scientific journals, including Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet. Dr. Owen has published over 450 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and a best-selling popular science book ‘Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death. He was awarded Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s Honors List, 2019, for services to scientific research and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in 2022, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2023 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2024.

I am the Principal Investigator at INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal; and Research Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, the UK. Before that I was Research Associate at the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London; and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. I obtained my PhD on ‘Physicalism and Qualia’ from the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France.

I am Lead Investigator on four ground-breaking projects looking at the relationship between self-consciousness, embodiment and social interactions in humans and artificial agents. To this end, my interdisciplinary team and I employ psychophysiological, behavioral and neural measures combined with conceptual and computational tools to advance our understanding of the fundamental question ”What is self-consciousness”  and “how it is affected by interactions with artificial minds and artificial bodies”.

I am Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Royal Society/Wellcome Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL, where I lead the Metacognition Group, and also Principal Investigator at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. The group’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between objective measures (behaviour and brain activity) and subjective experience and metacognition. Recent funding includes an ERC Consolidator Award (ConsciousComputation, 2023-2028) which will develop and test computational models of momentary conscious awareness. Our research on metacognition has been recognised by awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019), and the Royal Society Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (2023). I have a long-standing relationship with ASSC (my favourite conference), first attending in 2010 and then every year since (with the exception of Buenos Aires when our son was born…!). I won the William James Prize in 2012, was part of the Membership Committee from 2012-2013, and then Executive Director from 2014-2020. I am on the editorial board of OpenMind, PNAS Nexus and Mind and Language, and write widely for a general audience, including articles for Aeon, New Scientist and Scientific American, and most recently Know Thyself (2021), a trade book on the science of metacognition.

I am an assistant professor in philosophy at the Linguistics & Philosophy department at MIT. My work is at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, focusing in particular on the cognitive (neuro)science of consciousness. Since 2017, I have published between about 30 articles on consciousness, including on topics such as the neural correlates of consciousness, the methodological issue of measuring consciousness, unconscious perception, and non-human animal consciousness. Many of these articles have been published in collaboration with other members of the ASSC, most of the time scientists. I have been an active member of the ASSC community, both as a member of the scientific committee for previous ASSC meetings and as part of the team of local organizers for what I think was a very successful meeting in New York. So, I’d be very happy to serve as a member at large of the ASSC board to help this community flourish.