With colleagues, Pickard established and was the first chairman and clinical director of the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre (WBIC), a division of the University of Cambridge's Department of Clinical Neurosciences,[11] Pickard, in his capacity with the WBIC, worked with patients who were critically ill, the morbidly obese and patients with acute mental health and addiction problems.[12] From 2001 to 2013, Pickard was the National Health Service (NHS) divisional director for neurosciences at Addenbrooke's Hospital.[13] In 2009, Pickard became an NIHR senior investigator.[14] At the end of 2013, Pickard retired from full-time NHS practice and head of academic neurosurgery, but remained active in research as a voluntary director of research in the University of Cambridge.[15]
In 2013, Pickard became the first Cambridge HTC honorary director, which is one of eight national co-operatives that receive funding from the NIHR. The Cambridge HTC is the only HTC to focus on brain injury.[4][16]
In addition to his presidency of Society of British Neurological Surgeons (SBNS), Pickard was previously chairman of the Joint Neurosciences Council and remains the honorary civilian consultant for neurosurgery to the British Army.[17] Pickard was a member of the UK Government's Animal Procedures Committee and chaired a report into the assessment of cumulative severity and lifetime experience in non-human primates used in neuroscience. This report, also called the Pickard Report, was published in 2013.[18] In addition, Pickard was also president of Academia Eurasiana Neurochirurgica from 2011 to 2012.[19]
Pickard is a patron and former president of Cambridgeshire Headway,[20][21] a founder-trustee and chairman of the research committee of the Brain and Spine Foundation,[22] a trustee of the Brain Research Trust and was the first patron of Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (IIH) UK.[23]
Research
Pickard's research focuses on the care of critically ill patients after brain injury.[17][24][25] He led the British Aneurysm Nimodipine trial (BRANT), which demonstrated that nimodipine reduces the incidence of poor outcomes after subarachnoid haemorrhage by 40 per cent.[26] His work has included definition of how early insults to the brain in both childhood and later life may lead to late changes in cognitive outcome and new ways of detecting when the blood supply to critical areas of the brain becomes a risk.[27] Pickard established and chairs the Impaired Consciousness Research Group in Cambridge,[28] which demonstrated that functional neuroimaging could be used to detect awareness in patients who are incapable of generating any recognisable behavioural response and appeared to be in a vegetative state.[29][30]
With others, Pickard established the Cambridge Shunt Evaluation Laboratory, which provides an international service for shunt testing in-vivo, and the UK Shunt Registry in 1994.[32][33] The formation of the Registry was funded by the UK Department of Health Medical Devices Agency and contains data on over 70,000 cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shunt-related procedures.[33][34]
In 2000, Pickard received the Robert H. Pudenz Award for excellence in CSF physiology.[42] In 2008, he was awarded the Docteur Honoris Causa from the University of Liège, Belgium.[7] In 2010, Pickard was awarded the Guthrie Memorial Medal of the Royal Army Medical Corps[1] and named as one of Britain's top doctors by The Times.[43][44] In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Appreciation Award from the International Society for Hydrocephalus and CSF Disorders.[7]
^Pickard, JD; Matheson, M; Patterson, J; Wyper, D (1980). "Prediction of late ischemic complications after cerebral aneurysm surgery by the intraoperative measurement of cerebral blood flow". Journal of Neurosurgery. 53 (3): 305–8. doi:10.3171/jns.1980.53.3.0305. PMID7420145. S2CID33506496.
^Pickard, JD; Mackenzie, ET (1973). "Inhibition of prostaglandin synthesis and the response of baboon cerebral circulation to carbon dioxide". Nature New Biology. 245 (145): 187–8. doi:10.1038/newbio245187a0. PMID4200498.