James Morrison was a pioneering cognitive neuroscientist who joined the Institute at its inception in 1998, bringing expertise in fMRI methodologies and the neural substrates of attention. Trained at Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute, he established the Institute's neuroimaging laboratory and mentored two generations of PhD students in functional brain imaging. His collaborative work on prefrontal cortex mechanisms became a touchstone for the Institute's early reputation. He departed in 2007 to lead the Neuroscience Centre at the University of Edinburgh, where he continued his influential research programme until retirement in 2018.