ACCEPTING PHD STUDENTS

Stuart William George Derbyshire

Associate Professor Stuart William George Derbyshire

Faculty & Department

Psychology

Joint Appointments

Associate Professor, Nus College, NUS College

Acting Deputy Head, Psychology, Arts and Social Sciences

Jt Appt - Assoc Prof, NUS College, NUS College

Deputy Head, Psychology, Arts and Social Sciences

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, University of London, United Kingdom

Bachelor of Science Hons Class 2A, University of London, United Kingdom

Bio

Stuart Derbyshire is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department, with a joint appointment at NUSC. He obtained his PhD at University College London and then began a fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. He worked at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the University of Birmingham (U.K., not Alabama) before joining NUS in 2013. Stuart has worked with imaging technologies (PET and fMRI, some EEG) for more than three decades. His central aim has always been to understand what the brain does when someone experiences pain.

Affiliated Scholarships

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Contact Information

psydswg@nus.edu.sg NUS Discovery LinkedIn 0000-0002-2766-3424

The major aim of my research is to understand the nature of pain and to specifically address the intertwining of neural activity and pain subjectivity. Thus my work overlaps heavily with discussion on the nature of consciousness, and also abuts neural, psychological and sociological discussions on the meaning of suffering. I am most well-known for my writing on fetal pain and am now developing that work into a more comprehensive examination of brains, consciousness, development, and evolutionary psychology. If any of those areas appeal to you, and you want to work in an eclectic, multidisciplinary environment, please feel free to drop me an email.

Stuart Derbyshire has been actively involved in outreach work to improve the public understanding of a wide range of topics including chronic pain, fetal pain, animal awareness, infectious diseases, mobile phones, shopping, evolutionary psychology, and consciousness. He has been quoted extensively on those topics in the international print media, and on radio and television. He is also regularly consulted for his expertise and has submitted evidence for the UK Department of Health, the UK Commons Science and Technology Committee, he has spoken before the Virginia Senate in the US, and consulted for the New York Civil Liberties Association. In 2008-2010 and again in 2022-2023 he was a member of the UK Royal College of Gynaecologists working party to report on fetal awareness. Below are some of the articles Stuart has written for a general audience:

How Working Class Despair Fuelled the Opioid Crisis. https://tinyurl.com/3984wvkm

Understanding Singapore’s Covid miracle A heartening scientific triumph. https://tinyurl.com/4mn8pfta

Pig hearts and human ingenuity. https://tinyurl.com/y5b6l87b

The ‘Biobag’: hope for premature babies? https://tinyurl.com/yayqx3la

Exploding myths of gender. https://tinyurl.com/ya4y92hs

The college where thinking is still allowed. https://tinyurl.com/ycodeu9y

Chronic Pain

Pain Management

Consciousness

Neuroscience

Perception

Clinical sciences

Neurosciences

Biological psychology

Clinical and health psychology

Pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences

Nutrition and dietetics

Cognitive and computational psychology

Epidemiology

Public health

Applied ethics

These are some of the specific questions that my lab is currently addressing:

What is the nature of pain? Is it inherently surprising or unpleasant?

What is the role of cortical activity during pain experience?

How does pain develop? Does pain automatically emerge once certain neural processes are in place or is a period of cognitive and affective development necessary for pain experience?

How does hypnosis alter pain experience?

Why and when do noxious stimuli not hurt? (What are the mechanisms of Offset Analgesia?)