It is a great pleasure to have been asked to give the citation for Professor Christian Lueck, this years’ Gordon Holmes ABN International Lecturer, since almost 40 years have passed since we first met when I was a young consultant at the Royal London Hospital and Christian my somewhat younger clinical research fellow.

It is extremely appropriate that Christian should have been invited to give this prestigious lecture, named after Gordon Holmes one of the founders of modern clinical neurology, as he, like Holmes, has pursued a similar career as a clinical neurologist, clinician scientist and educator.

Christian studied medicine at Cambridge and St Thomas’s hospital, where he collected numerous prizes and distinctions and after the usual collection of junior posts in medicine and neurology in various London Teaching Hospital’s he joined me at the Royal London Hospital in 1987 as a Wellcome Research Fellow.

Holmes, when he was an army neurologist in France in the First World War used the visual field defects resulting from isolated missile wounds to the brain in British soldiers to undertake a complete mapping of the visual field onto the primary visual cortex. In the spirit of Holmes, Christian decided to determine whether he could obtain evidence of functional specialisation in the extrastriate visual cortex of man, a concept which had largely been dismissed by many leading neurologists earlier in the 20th century. Using functional PET, and how functional imaging has moved on since those days, and in collaboration with Semir Zeki and Richard Frackowiak, he was the first person to identify a separate colour area, visual area 4, which resulted in a first author Nature paper. This was followed by papers showing a separate visual area dedicated to motion, visual area 5, nailing the concept of functional specialisation in the human extrastriate cortex.

In addition to these imaging studies as well as delving into visual psychophysics, Christian completed his PhD on saccadic eye movements in patients with disorders of the basal ganglia. He then held posts at Queen Square, before he was appointed Consultant Neurologist at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. This was a busy clinical job with little time for research, so much to many of his fellow neurologist’s surprise Christian headed off to the Antipodes in 2003, perhaps egged on by his Australian wife, Diana. There he took up the post of Senior Staff Specialist at the Canberra Hospital and Professor at the Australian National University Medical School..

In the 20 years he has been in Canberra he has gained a reputation as a dedicated clinical neurologist and clinician scientist. With colleagues he has investigate several areas of overlap between basic visual science and clinical neurology and neuro-ophthalmology, as well as working on the introduction of machine learning into neurology. For this and much more Christian has gained a reputation as a highly regarded researcher being awarded the E. Graeme Robertson Award by the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists for career achievements in neuroscience.

As an educator he has always been a dedicated undergraduate and postgraduate teacher, having exceptional clarity combined with scientific rigor when lecturing, something I am sure we will shortly experience. For this he was awarded the National Award for Excellence in University Teaching by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council in 2010. He has also been a great advocate for neuro-ophthalmology and has been a key member of the Neuro-ophthalmology Society of Australia (NOSA), serving as its President for several years, and has held various prominent positions in the major international neuro-ophthalmology societies.

This stellar career culminated in his award last year, of one of Australia’s highest civilian honours, Membership of the Order of Australia, “for significant service to neurology and neuro-ophthalmology through medical research and clinical practise”.

So, it gives me great pleasure to invite Christian to give this years’ Gordon Holmes ABN International Lecture entitled “A journey to the centre of the chiasm.”

Chris Kennard, May 2025

When Professor Walsh was selected as the 2024 Gordon Holmes lecturer, I was immediately transported back 25 years to when I was starting out in my neurological career with a PhD in epilepsy and developmental genetics.

There is no question that at the time he was at the forefront of discovering and describing the function and roles of genes causing malformations of cortical development such as Filamin 1, Doublecortin and Reelin.

I was therefore in awe that he was to speak at the ABN conference but positively starstruck to be introducing him.

His medical and neuroscience training was in Chicago and then he moved to Harvard to do post-doctoral training with Constance Cepko, another giant of developmental biology.

He took up assistant and then full professorships in neurology and genetics at Harvard Medical School, Beth Deaconess Medical Centre and Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

His international collaborations, prizes and illustrious awards, as well as his membership of august societies are too many to list, as we do want to hear his talk.

Most importantly his research has consistently been at the cutting edge of developmental genetics of the cerebral cortex and its disorders.

This work led onto research into brain evolutionary genetics and the set-up, jointly, of the Discovery Centre for Human Brain Evolution at Harvard.

So, from brain development, through to evolutionary genetics, he has now moved onto to another frontier; neurodegeneration. In addition, he has now taken the study of genetics and genomics literally and metaphorically to a different level; the individual brain cell.

It gives me great pleasure now to welcome Professor Walsh to give his talk “You contain multitudes; Human Brain Mosaicism in Neurological Diseases, from Development to Degeneration.

Lucy Kinton, May 2024

From Darjeeling to Texas via England

I have the great honour of giving today’s citation for our Gordon Holmes lecturer and introducing Professor Samden Lhatoo, FRCP, London, to you today.

Sam is well known to many of us. He has had and continues to have an illustrious career, and many of his formative years in neurology and in epilepsy, his subspecialty, were in the UK.

Sam graduated in 1991 from the University of Delhi’s Mawlana Azad Medical College, a top ranking medical Institute in India, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine in Chandigarh in 1994. He obtained his MRCP and trained in neurology the UK between 1994 and 2010, at the Radcliffe in Oxford, Frenchay in Bristol, when some of his early influential work came from – those who worked with him at the time described him as a great colleague, hard-working, brilliant, dynamic and already driven - and at Queen Square. He undertook a two-year fellowship in epilepsy at the National Hospital and a further epilepsy EEG research fellowship at the renowned Cleveland Clinic Foundation… somehow also finding time for an MBA.

Sam took up a post in the US at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio in 2010 but was recruited in December 2018 to McGovern Medical School in Houston Texas, where he currently works as an academic and clinical epileptologist.

He is a: Distinguished University Professor of Neurology, Executive Vice Chair in Neurology, Co-Director of the Texas Institute of Restorative Neurotechnologies, and The Director of the Texas Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, a collaboration between McGovern and Memorial Hermann Hospital, which is a level 4 state of the art programme, the highest such national designation.

Sam is giving the Gordon Holmes lecture today. As we just heard, Sir Gordon Holmes was the gifted son of a well-to-do Anglo-Irish farmer in Ireland, born north of Dublin, who after qualifying as a doctor, worked his way from Ireland, to New Zealand, then Germany, where he studied neurology, before being appointed in 1906 at Queen Square.

Like him, Professor Lhatoo is a man of the world. Though he comes to us now from the US, he is Tibetan by ancestry, born in Darjeeling India, where it is said the best tea comes from, qualified in Delhi, and later trained in England before settling in the US . As co-director and co-principal investigator of the NIH funded Centre for SUDEP Research, he is highly qualified to address his topic today, namely:

Mortality and SUDEP: Observations to be targeted.

Join me in giving a very warm welcome to our distinguished guest speaker: Professor Samden Lhatoo.

Lina Nashef, May 2023