Dr Stephen Thomas’s lifelong interest in the brain and neuroscience began with an MSc in pharmacology and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Cambridge.
Early research, funded by the Medical Research Council, was focused on the role of the limbic system in the control of behaviour, and he was also involved in ground-breaking research on synaptic plasticity and recovery of function after brain injury, publishing in top neuroscience journals including Nature.
In industry, he was a founding Research Fellow and drug giant Merck’s Neuroscience Research Centre, focussing on drug discovery for anxiety and Alzheimers. Subsequently he went on to work for a string of world-leading companies including HP, Digital, GSK, Oracle and Accenture, focusing on the interplay between digital technologies and pharmaceutical research.
As an entrepreneur, in the first decade of the 2000s, he was a founder and Board member of two specialist pharma industry consulting companies, working exclusively for Tier 1 pharma clients on major discovery research and clinical trial programmes. For most of the second decade of the 2000s, he was a senior academic and professor at a Russell Group business School, winning major research grants from the EPSRC and a Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award for the Faculty of Business and Law. Over this period, he did extensive research and pioneered the new field of neurobusiness, which explores the business implications and applications of advances in neuroscience. Dr Thomas also introduced these ‘neuro’ ideas to fascinated young minds in courses on Innovation and Marketing in the Digital Age, and also taught industry professionals, as a lead professor for the Institute of Neuroleadership in New York. He left the confines of academia in 2018 to found NeuroForm Ltd and take his research back into practice. NeuroForm Education, formed recently in response to demand, focuses on training in critical areas of neuroscience including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
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