Craig Ritchie

Craig Ritchie is the CEO and Founder of Scottish Brain Sciences and Professor of Brain Health and Neurodegenerative Medicine at the University of St Andrews. 

His interests lie in translational epidemiology and clinical trials for the secondary prevention of dementia. His work in this field dates back to 1997,  when he worked in the laboratory of Prof. Colin Masters at the University of Melbourne before returning to UCL in 2000 to complete his PhD through an MRC Health Services Research Fellowship. He was appointed as senior lecturer in old age psychiatry at Imperial College London in 2007. While in that post, he was also 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 returned to his native Scotland to take up a 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. In 2017, he was elected as chair of the Scottish Dementia Research Consortium, and in 2020 has become the inaugural director of Brain Health Scotland. In 2022, frustrated by the speed of implementing innovative treatments for patients, he established Scottish Brain Sciences, the aim of which is to provide seamless translation of innovations into practice. He has over 400 academic publications and secured almost £100M of grant funding in his career to date.