Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE

The Impact of Technology on Risk Management, Leadership and Creativity

The wonderful thing about being a human being is that although we are born with a full complement of brain cells, it is the growth of connections between the cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. These connections reflect the unique sequence, – a life-story, of individual experiences and interactions with the outside world: a phenomenon known as ‘plasticity’ that leads to the personalisation of the physical brain, amounting to a ‘mind’. Given the unprecedented challenges posed by the digital world to emotions and well-being, we need to devise the best ways for optimising fulfilment of each individual’s potential with a correspondingly new type of leadership that can encompass insights informed by neuroscience on, for example, risk management and creativity.

Susan is a scientist, academic, writer, broadcaster and one of the world’s leading authorities in neuroscience. She considers the way the brain works and how it’s being transformed by the world around us.

Susan was the first female director of the Royal Institution and is now the Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford and Chief Scientific Officer and CEO of biotech company Neuro-bio. Her many bestselling books include Mind Change: How digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains, ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century, Tomorrow’s People and The Human Brain – A Guided Tour.

A regular writer for scientific and popular press, Susan has written for The Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and New Scientist. She has been profiled as one of the fifty most powerful women in Europe, and included in the Debrett’s 500, a list of ‘ the most influential and inspiring people in Britain’.

Given the unprecedented challenges posed by the digital world to emotions and well-being, Susan will explore the need to devise the best ways for optimising fulfilment of our potential with a correspondingly new type of leadership that can encompass insights informed by neuroscience on risk management and creativity.

Read more on Susan here.