Prof Craig Ritchie is the Professor of the Psychiatry of Ageing at the University of Edinburgh, having moved from his role as Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Mental Health at Imperial College London in October 2014. He completed his PhD at UCL through an MRC Health Services Research Fellowship and was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Old Age Psychiatry at Imperial College London in 2007. He has also served as R&D Director at West London Mental Health Trust from 2010-14 and Deputy Director of the London Northwest NIHR Clinical Research Network. In 2014 he was appointed as Chair in Psychiatry of Ageing at the University of Edinburgh. In 2015 he established the Centre for Dementia Prevention and that year took on the academic leadership role of the EPAD (European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia) Programme. Between 2017 and 2022 he was the elected Chair of the Scottish Dementia Research Consortium and in 2020 he founded and was the inaugural Director of Brain Health Scotland. He has published over 350 academic papers, conference abstracts and book chapters and secured approximately €100M of grant funding in his career to date.
His main research interest is the interface between clinical trials and translational epidemiology (cohort studies) with a drive to develop the infrastructures at a national level (in Scotland) to prepare health systems and prosecute rapid ‘research into practice’ programmes. He is a pioneer and leading advocate for the Brain Health Movement that works across the life course from primary to secondary prevention of late-stage neurodegenerative disease. This involved working at a public health and policy level as well as developing and implementing Brain Health Clinics across Scotland following ‘The Scottish Model for Brain Health Services’. This work has led Scotland to being one of the Flagship Countries in the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative for Health Care Readiness.