Abstract
With heartfelt sadness we inform our colleagues in the headache field of the passing of Prof Dr Edward P. Chronicle, or Ed to those who knew him well.
Edward Peter Chronicle was born on the auspicious date of Fourth of July, 1966. He was born and raised in Warwickshire, where he attended Warwick School. Later, he entered the University of Sheffield to study medicine. After a year he moved to the University of Southampton and switched disciplines to psychology, graduating with a first class honours degree in 1989. Ed was accepted as a graduate student by the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit (now the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit) at Cambridge University, and there he pursued his interest in medical aspects of psychology with research into the neurology of headache disorders.
Dr Chronicle successfully defended his dissertation in 1993, and then took up his first academic position, as Lecturer with the Psychology Department at Lancaster University. Except for a 1-year sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley, Ed remained at Lancaster for the next 10 years, attaining the academic rank of Senior Lecturer and appointment as Associate Dean for Postgraduate Studies, Faculty of Applied Sciences.
Anyone who met Ed even for the briefest time would immediately be struck by his enthusiasm and sense of fun. As a young man, he was a keen cyclist and he apparently still holds a local U-16 record for a 5-mile time trial. He spent many happy times Youth Hostelling and indeed became assistant warden at Stratford Youth Hostel for a time. He spent much time undertaking community work both at school and at Southampton University. Stage lighting was one of his many interests, both in the amateur and professional theatre, including such challenging jobs as arranging the stage lighting for the renowned comedy act Hinge and Bracket! At Cambridge he took up rowing and became Captain of Boats at Darwin College.
Although just entering what would normally be the middle stage of an academic career, Ed had already made many contributions in two distinct areas of psychology, in problem-solving and, as we came to know him, in migraine.
The first interest he had adopted early in his time at Lancaster. The research produced publications in some of the field's highest ranking journals, as well as the first full computational model of insight problem-solving processes. As well as work on insight, the collaboration introduced a new field of Cognitive research into human performance in combinatorial optimization problems, exemplified by the Travelling Salesman Problem, a task of finding the shortest route around a set of locations. It culminated in the first International Workshop on optimization problem-solving, co-organized by Ed and held at Purdue University in 2005.
His other interest was visual processing, in particular relating to migraine pathophysiology, which was the topic of his dissertation. He defended the position that a dysfunctional visual cortex was not only responsible for the migrainous symptoms relating to the visual system, but more importantly was critical in the sequence of events leading up to a migraine attack. In his many publications, he argued that cortical underinhibition might lead to hyperexcitability and susceptibility to spreading depression and, conversely, that repeated spreading depression and possibly hypoxia may confer selective damage to inhibitory neurons. Although his position was intensely debated, we are struck by the recent finding from Takano et al. that cortical spreading depression in an in vivo mouse model caused pericapillary hypoxia due to excessive oxygen demand. Perhaps Ed was well ahead of his time after all …
In 2003, Ed moved (with his long-term partner Emily Fay, previously alumni officer at Lancaster University) to the University of Hawaii to take the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. In Hawaii, Ed developed a very active laboratory with a dedicated group of excellent graduate and undergraduate students working with him in both his research areas. A week before Christmas, 2006, Ed was formally notified by the National Institutes of Health that he was the successful coapplicant for a grant of $1.6 million over the next 5 years. Perhaps the most significant achievement of Ed's life was the joy and friendship he brought to everyone who met him. One of the things that we admired about Ed was that, while he was a fun person to know, he was also a very moral and good person. As well as a great colleague, Ed was one of our dearest friends; we are grateful to have known him and will miss him dreadfully.