Professor Gemma A. Calvert

Gemma A. Calvert, BSc, DPhil, CPsychol, FRSA is the Managing Director of Neurosense Limited, one of the world’s longest established Applied Neuroscience and Neuromarketing companies. Her research expertise spans the fields of consumer neuroscience, functional human brain imaging, and behavioral psychology.
 
She has published extensively in high profile scientific journals, including Science and Nature Neuroscience and her research has been featured in the international media including CBS’s 60 Minutes, BBC’s Inside Out and World Business programs, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the Economist. Over the past 10 years she has acted as an advisor to numerous global packaged goods companies, fragrance houses, and government departments including the French Prime Minister’s office.
 
Prior to her academic career, Gemma worked as an Account Manager for FKB Carlson, developing sales promotional and direct marketing strategies for clients before returning to academe. She earned a BSc in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and in 1994 won a prestigious Medical Research Council Scholarship to the University of Oxford where she earned her DPhil in Clinical Medicine, specializing in the then nascent field of human functional brain imaging.
 
She subsequently established and directed the Multisensory Research Group based at Oxford’s Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) and the University Department of Physiology until 2004 before taking up a Readership at the University of Bath. In 2008 at the age of 41, she took up a Chair in Applied Neuroscience at the Warwick Manufacturing Group based at the University of Warwick.
 
Gemma’s combined expertise in marketing and neuroscience led her to establish the world’s first neuromarketing consultancy, Neurosense Limited, in 1999. The company specializes in the application of neuroscience to help manufacturers, marketers, and public bodies better understand and predict consumer behaviour. The company boasts among its clients several large multinationals including Unilever, Procter and Gamble, GSK, Viacom, ITV, Omnicom, Givaudan, and McDonald’s Europe.
 
Gemma coedited The Handbook of Multisensory Processes, authored Crossmodal Processing in the Human Brain: Insights from Functional Neuroimaging Studies, and coauthored Activation of Auditory Cortex During Silent Lipreading, Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging of crossmodal binding in the human heteromodal cortex, Colored Noise and Computational Inference in Neurophysiological (fMRI) Time Series Analysis: Resampling Methods in Time and Wavelet Domains, Detection of Audio-Visual Integration Sites in Humans by Application of Electrophysiological Criteria to the BOLD Effect, and Cortical substrates for the perception of face actions: an fMRI study of the specificity of activation for seen speech and for meaningless lower-face acts (gurning).
 
You can watch Gemma on BBC3’s Secrets of the Superbrands and listen to her interviews on BBC Radio 4 with Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time: Neuroscience and In Our Time: Perception and the Senses.