Shibley Rahman

Early life
Dr Shibley Rahman MA MB BChir PhD MRCP(UK) FRSA MSB (born 18 June 1974) is a British academic, neuroscientist and entrepreneur, born in the Queen Mother's Hospital in Glasgow. His parents are both Bengali; his father is a retired successful general practitioner, having practised near Brighton for nearly thirty years. He lives alone in the village of Primrose Hill, North London, and has no children.
He originally went to Cumnor House School, Danehill, East Sussex, which is known to have a very academic reputation. Previous alumni include Nigel Lawson, a former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shibley Rahman excelled academically during his time there, and then was awarded as a prestigious at Westminster School, London, on the basis of a competitive entrance examination known as "The Challenge" in May 1987. He was approximate contemporaries with profilic economist and journalist Philippe Legrain, leading entrepreneur and businessperson Martha Lane Fox, BBC Foreign Affairs Correspondent James Reynolds, and . As part of his duties as a Queen's Scholar, Shibley Rahman attended regularly eucharist services in Westminster Abbey, and performed compline weekly.
Having achieved four grade As in mathematics, further mathematics, chemistry and physics, all at GCE Advanced Level and two grade 1s in the Special Paper at Advanced Level, he then worked briefly in a vacation job at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in a junior research role involving superconductivity.
Medical training
He then went to the University of Cambridge in the Michaelmas Term 1993. There, he studied the Medical and Veterinary Sciences Tripos, and was awarded the second highest first class honours degree mark in his Bachelor of Arts in neuroscience in the Natural Sciences Tripos, 1996. He was awarded a foundation scholarship by his college, Jesus College, Cambridge.
For his finals, he was supervised by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, from Trinity College, Cambridge. His dissertation was on the inheritance of synaesthesia, a condition where one stimulus can trigger a perception in another modality. Shibley Rahman's first official contribution to research was, in fact, doing the index for a short book by Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen. Shibley Rahman acknowledges Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen as he reason he decided to pursue medical research.
He then completed his medical training at Cambridge, graduating in 2001. He was one of a handful of people to do the M.B./Ph.D. course at Cambridge, where academically-minded medical students are allowed to do a period of research in a laboratory at Cambridge. His doctor of philosophy on specific cognitive deficits in the frontal dementias was conferred by the University of Cambridge without corrections, also in 2001. He passed the Membership Examination through the Royal College
of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the Royal
College of Physicians of London in April 2005. and become an Advanced Life Support provider in cardiac arrests in August 2003.
Legal education
Since 2006, he has completed his Graduate Diploma in Law (postgraduate certificate in the law) at BPP Law School in London, and was subsequently awarded his Bachelor of Laws there. He is currently a part-time student of the Master of Laws at the College of Law of England and Wales, where he has specialised in commercial law. Shibley Rahman's interests have subsequently developed as being wide-ranging, encompassing a diverse range of issues in general medicine, law, ethics and neuroethics. Shibley Rahman has been a member of the World Neuroethics Society since early 2010.
Professional life
Shibley Rahman became ellected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society for the Encouragement in the Arts, Commerce and Entrepreneurship in 2010, where he participates in the Social Brain project on the basis of his excellence in research in social neuroscience.
Shibley Rahman has written two books on postgraduate medical education, and is passionate about medical and legal e-learning, being a company director of an internet-based education company. He is an associate member of the Institute of Directors, and is a l. PRINCE2 is a systematic mechanism used by many project managers for managing a complex project in a controlled environment. He is also active in medical journalism, being a member of the European Medical Writers' Association. As part of his career, a commitment to the adequate explanation of complex scientific and medical concepts has been pervasive.
He was elected to membership of the Society of Biology, where all members have to hold a postgraduate degree in a biological science, and be able to demonstrate a commitment to furthering the biological sciences,
Academic and professional interests
Shibley Rahman has written a number of authoritative articles on the subject of dementia generally , and is internationally reputed to be an expert in frontotemporal dementia, which was a result of an innovative translationary approach to how the heterogeneity of function within the frontal lobes in humans and other animals could lead to an understanding of the neurobiology of frontotemporal dementia . In the last decade, there has been growing realisation about the difference in cognitive profiles, for example in perceptual and mnemonic function, between Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementias , and research has indeed elucidated that this difference is fundamentally attributed to the distinct neural networks concerned .
His seminal paper introduced evidence that a major area of pathology early in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia was located in a part of the prefrontal cortex called the "orbitofrontal cortex". Shibley Rahman and colleagues used a decision-making paradigm similar to the Iowa Gambling Task, originally developed by Antoine Bechara and António Damásio. In the Brain study, patients with frontal dementia were found to show genuine risk-taking behaviour with increased deliberation times rather than merely impulsive behaviour. Given the nature of the cognitive deficits demonstrated by these patients, the authors postulated that relatively early in the course of the disease, the ventromedial (or orbitofrontal) cortex was a major locus of dysfunction, and that this would most likely relate to the behavioural presentation of these patients clinically described in the individual case histories. The paper has prompted a considerable debate for the last decade in the cognitive neuroscience of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, as the citations of that paper demonstrate .
This research has led to a greater appraisal of the importance of decision-making in common neuropsychiatric conditions .
This finding has furthermore been of significance in the development in new strategies for the treatment of symptoms in this form of dementia , and has led to his own published work on methylphenidate and paroxetine .
Having helped to define the parcellation of function in the frontal lobes in frontal dementia, Shibley Rahman has also written on how cognitive, motivational and motor factors might influence each other in neurodegenerative disease. This has been an important emergent recent theme in the neuroscience literature . Whilst a post-doctoral student at the Institute of Neurology at Queen Square, London, part of the , he published two important papers based on a questionnaire survey of patients with idiopathic . He found that a number of factors could specifically tend to cause or ameliorate the phenomenon of "" in this condition . In this particular study, it was noted that the factors that commonly induced freezing-of-gait were, in fact, turning, fatigue, confined spaces and stressful situations, in addition to emotional factors. In contrast, freezing-of-gait was also ameliorated by various attentional and external cueing strategies. In a different study, he was able to demonstrate that the quality of life in patients with Parkinson's disease tended to be heavily influenced by certain factors above others . In that particular study, in addition to depression and anxiety, the major predictors of quality-of-life were found to be shuffling, difficulty turning, falls, difficulty in dressing, fatigue, confusion, autonomic disturbance particularly urinary incontinence, unpredictable on/off fluctuations, and sensory symptoms such as pain. However, it should be noted that the size of the sample was relatively small, and the findings of the exact questionnaire have never been replicated by any other international group studying freezing-of-gait, although the results have been broadly similar.
Personal interests
Shibley Rahman is active on the social media as a known supporter of the UK Labour Party, and takes part occasionally in internet debates. He was rendered physically disabled after his meningitis in 2007 , and campaigns actively on raising awareness of general disability issues. His interests otherwise include cooking and films.
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