Professor Blakemore is one of the most distinguished rising stars of cognitive neuroscience, the discipline in which she holds a chair at University College, London. Her lecture topic on Tuesday 8 November was the teenage brain, and she explored how its development in teenage years is a remarkably complex process.

One feature of her talk was the teenager’s relationship to risk, and how the teenage brain calculates this in different ways to the mature adult. Professor Blakemore’s talk also included exciting visualisations of how the networks and pathways in the human brain undergo changes during the teenage years. This outstanding lecture gave all of us an accessible and illuminating entry into this most exciting and mysterious aspects of human health and development.