Dr Iain McGilchrist

is the Chancellor of Ralston College,  appointed to that post in September 2025 as successor to Dr Jordan B. Peterson. As Chancellor, Dr McGilchrist is the formal and ceremonial head of Ralston College. The most ancient role at the university—with its origins in the Middle Ages—the Chancellor is both a symbol and a guardian: a symbol of continuity with centuries of artistic creation and philosophical reflection; of intellectual community and discovery; and a guardian of the freedoms on which these depend, of the activities that sustain them, and of the ceremonies that crown them. Above all, the Chancellorship advances the university's most fundamental aim: to kindle and enlarge the human spirit.

Dr McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, author, and thinker of extraordinary versatility and originality, who delivered the Sophia Lectures for Ralston College in 2024. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry.

Dr McGilchrist is also the author of a number of books, including The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale, 2009). A book on epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World will be published by Perspectiva Press in October of 2021. Dr McGilchrist maintains an online platform at Channel McGilchrist. He lives on the Isle of Skye and has two daughters and a son.