Trustees and Officers

President

Deborah. L. Delanoy, Ph.D.

Having joined the Society in 1980, Deborah was co-opted to the Council in 1995 and elected in 2000.  She is Professor of Psychology  and Associate Dean for the School of Social Sciences (Research and Enterprise) at the University of Northampton;  she is also Founder and past Director of the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes (CSAPP), University of Northampton. Deborah's research has included the training and development of ESP ability, ganzfeld work, designing methods for testing ESP outside the laboratory, meta-analyses of psi experiments, examining psi-conducive target characteristis and DMILS (direct mental interaction with living systems) work.

Vice Presidents

Mary Rose Barrington, MA

Mary Rose graduated from ghost stories to Lodge's Survival of Man while at school, and later took a turn as President of the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research. She joined the SPR in 1957, becoming a Council member in 1962.  She has participated in many investigations and experiments, and has served on the Spontaneous Cases Committee since its inception. Before retirement she was a lawyer and charity administrator, and in the voluntary sector engaged actively in the causes of animal protection and voluntary euthanasia.  In 1995 she was elected as Vice-President of the Society.  Her most substantial publication is A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki, written jointly with Ian Stevenson and Zofia Weaver (McFarland, 2005).

Prof. Bernard J. Carr, MA PhD

Bernard joined the Society in 1962, was co-opted to Council in 1975, and became an elected Member of Council in 1977. He was the SPR Education Officer from 1985 to 2000, organising Study Days and the Annual International Conference.  He is Chairman of the Research Activities Committee and the Conference Programme Committee.  Formerly a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he is now Professor in Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.  He was President of the Society from 2000 to 2004. 

Tony D. Cornell, MA

Tony joined the SPR in 1952, was elected to Council in 1962 and became Vice President in 1992. Elected Hon Treasurer in 1980, he resigned in 2003 having held the post for 22 years. He is mainly interested in investigating hauntings, poltergeists and mediums. With Alan Gauld and Howard Wilkinson he created SPIDER (Spontaneous Psychological Incident recorder)). Many cases were monitored, photographically and electronically, but little significant evidence was obtained in twenty years of its use. He visited Russian parapsychologists in Leningrad and Moscow in 1971 to discuss their telepathy experiments.

He was CUSPR (Cambridge University SPR) Research Officer in 1958 and President in 1968. As the SPR Treasurer and ongoing CUSPR President, he served on the organising committee for the SPR Centenary Conference held at Trinity College Cambridge in 1982. He has made frequent appearances on TV here and abroad as an investigator. Is an author of papers on ghosts and poltergeists but expresses some cautious opinion about the interesting Scole, SORRAT Min-lab (USA) and Enfield cases. He has co-authored Poltergeists with Alan Gauld (1979), Routledge & Kegan Paul. London. His most recent book is Investigating the Paranormal (2002) Helix Press New York. By far his most pressing concern is the continued lack of any new knowledge gained about their cause in recent investigations, which have been conducted in an almost identical way for the last 125 years.

Prof. D.G. Fontana, BA, MEd, PhD, FBPsS, CPsychol

David has been a member of Council since 1992, and served as President from 1995 to 1998.  Currently he is the Chair of the Survival Research Committee and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal.  He has published numerous articles in the Journal and the Paranormal Review, and was co-author with Montague Keen and Arthur Ellison of The Scole Report.  He is the author of some 30 books translated into 26 languages.

Alan O. Gauld, MA PhD DLitt

Alan is a retired Reader in Psychology, having taught biological psychology and neuropsychology at the University of Nottingham.  He has written or co-authored five books: The Founders of Psychical Research; Human Action and Its Psychological Investigation (with John Shotte); Poltergeists (with Tony Cornell); Mediumship and Survival; and History of Hypnotism.  He is a past President of the SPR, recipient of the Parapsychology Association's Award for Outstanding Contributions to Parapsychological Research, and the Myers Memorial Medal of the SPR.

Prof. John C. Poynton, MSc PhD

John Poynton is Professor Emeritus of biology at the University of Natal, South Africa, a research associate of the Natural History Museum, London, and a scientific fellow of the Zoological Society of London.  His main research has been in African zoology and biogeography; he has also published in the philosophy of science and in psychical research.  He served on the council of the South African Society for Psychical Research, and subsequently served on the council of the Society for Psychical Research in London, where he was the Hon. Secretary from 1997 to his election as President in 2004.  On standing down as President in 2007 he resumed the post of Hon. Secretary.

Prof. Archie E. Roy, BSc FRAS FRSE FBIS

 Archie is Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow and Fellow of The Royal Astronomical Society, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and of the British Interplanetary Society.  He is a member of the International Astronomical Union (which named an asteroid after him), and of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and the Humanities.  He is also a member and past President of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. He joined the SPR in 1973, served as its President during 1992-1995, and joined the SPR Council in 1995.  He has published 18 books, six of them novels, some 70 scientific papers and scores of articles.  His books on psychical research include A Sense of Something Strange and The Archives of the Mind.

Prof Donald J. West, MD LittD FRCPsych

Donald joined the SPR as a teenager and from 1941 to the present has made intermittent contributions to Journal and Proceedings, including two surveys of apparitions and a series of collaborative ESP researches with the late G.W. Fisk, for which they received jointly the McDougall Award, 1958, for disgtinguished work in parapsychology. He was full-time paid Research Officer from 1946 for 3 years, serving subesquently as Hon. Research Officer and in various other capacities since.  His Penguin book Psychical Research Today (1954) was revised in 1962.  He has served for many years as a member of the SPR Grants Committee and the Management Committee of the Perrott-Warrick Fund at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received the Myers Memorial Medal in 1997. 

Elected and Co-opted Members of Council

Chris Bratcher,  MA

Chris became our Hon. Treasurer in July 2007, upon retirement from Tax Inspecting.  He has had a similar post in the Humanist movement.     Academically, he was a philosopher and has lectured and written in the Philosophy of Mind & Ethics in his spare time ever since.  It was reading C.D. Broad & H.H. Price that caused him to join the Society at the end of the sixties, participating in 'table-turning' experiments with Ken Batcheldor and groups seeking to replicate his results.  He is most interested in macro-PK, controlled or otherwise, largely because he thinks that the phenomena would be hardest to gainsay - and more rewarding to watch than money flows.    

Richard Broughton, PhD

Richard joined the Society in 1975 when he was working on his PhD at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of John Beloff. Following appointments at the State University of Utrecht and the State University of New York, Richard joined the Institute for Parapsychology (successor to the famous Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory) in Durham, North Carolina where he eventually served as director for five years. In 2000 he left to establish Intuition Laboratories, Inc., but returned to the UK and to academia, joining the psychology division of The University of Northampton in 2004. In addition to numerous scientific papers, Dr. Broughton is author of Parapsychology: The Controversial Science (Ballantine, 1991) a popular and critically acclaimed introduction to the field that has been translated into six languages.  He frequently serves as a commentator in television programs on parapsychology and intuition issues, including ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Dateline, and documentaries for the BBC, NHK, CBC, The Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, among others. Dr. Broughton is a twice past president and long-time board member of the Parapsychological Association and he has served on the SPR Council since 2004.

Prof. Bernard J. Carr, MA PhD

See under Vice President above.

Barrie G Colvin BSc PhD

Barrie joined the SPR in 1973 and was co-opted to Council in 2007. He has been actively involved in the investigation of mental and physical mediums, including direct-voice, transfiguration and materialisation mediumship. Past projects have included the investigation of haunted houses, the human aura, X-ray analysis of hair reported to be taken from the head of Katie King and evaluation of evidence from Gerard Croiset in a missing person case. His principal interest in recent times has been the physics of poltergeist activity, including the development of instrumentation for this branch of the subject. He developed and successfully trialled infra-red absorption equipment as well as a bespoke mid-frequency infra-red camera for poltergeist field work. His most recent project has been a study of the acoustic properties of poltergeist rapping sounds.

He has formed the Poltergeist Research Group, an assembly of interested specialists, and is a member of the Spontaneous Cases Committee of the SPR.

Prof. Deborah Delanoy, BA PhD

See under President above.

David Ellis, MA  

David joined the Society in 1970.  After graduating from Cambridge in Natural Sciences and working for six years in industrial research, he held the Perrott-Warrick Studentship from 1970-72, investigating what were then known as the 'Raudive voices' (later EVP).  Unable to find any further full-time opening in psychical research, he took up litho printing, soon specializing in books and journals.  This enabled him to produce and publish his research report as The Mediumship of the Tape Recorder in 1978, and do various printing jobs for the Society.  After acquiring typesetting equipment he was able to take on the Proceedings (from 1989) and the Journal (from 1991) .  He was appointed Production Editor for the Journal in 1991 in recognition of his subediting work, and he has proof-read the Paranormal Review since it was the SPR Newsletter in 1988.  David has contributed to the Journal and Paranormal Review and also to the Christian Parapsychologist (which as printer he had helped found in 1975), and he gave a paper at the Parapsychology Foundation Conference, Parapsychology and the Sciences, in 1972.  He joined the Parapsychological Association as an Associate Member in 1972 and became a Full Member in 2003.  He was elected to Council in 2005.                                           

Prof. David G. Fontana, BA MEd PhD FBPsS Cpsychol

See under Vice President above

John Fraser

John joined the SPR in the late 1990s and, in 2003, became a member of the Spontaneous Cases Committee, where he worked to widen the Committee’s accessibility to the general public through the Society’s website. He was invited to join the Council  in 2008.

John’s active interest in the paranormal dates from the 1980s, when he participated in a long- running series of hypnotic regression experiments, assisting in the co-ordination of sessions and being trained in hypnotic regression techniques. Like many such experiments, despite some impressive results, it was inconclusive.

In 1988, following a research project regarding supernatural occurrences at Sandwood Bay in Sutherland, he was invited to join the Ghost Club, where he became the ‘Vice Chair’ (with investigations portfolio) 1998-2004.

John has appeared in a number of media discussions of the paranormal  (including Japanese Television). He is currently working on a book on the practicable goals for paranormal research, and the ways to achieve them.

Alan O. Gauld, MA PhD Dlitt

See under Vice President above

David Luke, BSc PhD

David Luke joined the SPR in 1993, he was co-opted to Council in 2009. Currently he is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich where he teaches an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experiences. David is also the Director of the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture series at the October Gallery, Bloomsbury, London and a Research Associate at the Beckley Foundation, Oxford, an organisation dedicated to the study of consciousness and its altered states. He has been elected to serve as President of the Parapsychological Association, the professional international organisation for the scientific study of parapsychology, between 2009-2011.

Alan D. Murdie, LLB

Alan has been a member of the SPR since 1997 and was co-opted to the Council 1999.  He is a lawyer by profession and has investigated spontaneous cases both in Britain and abroad.  He served for several years as chairman of The Ghost Club.

Guy Lyon Playfair, BA

Guy Lyon Playfair joined the SPR in 1974 and is currently a member of the Library, Survival and Image, Publicity and Publications committees. A graduate of Cambridge University, he has been a freelance journalist and photographer since 1963. He spent 14 years in Brazil where he collected material for the first two of his twelve books, the most recent of which are Twin Telepathy (2002) and New Clothes for Old Souls (2006).  His research activities have included collaboration with Maurice Grosse on the Enfield poltergeist case of 1977-78 and with Montague Keen on the Jacqueline Poole murder case (2004). He is a regular contributor to the SPR Journal and his Mediawatch  column, featuring criticism of extreme scepticism, appeared in 32 consecutive issues of the Paranormal Review from 1996 to 2004, and now appears regularly on the website skepticalinvestigations.org.

John L. Randall, BSc CertEd CertCouns DipWS

John is a retired biology teacher.  He has been a member of the SPR since his student days, and as a visiting Research Fellow spent some months at the Institute for Parapsychology in North Carolina in 1970.  He has published many papers in the JSPR, chiefly on the experiments he conducted in his former laboratory at Leamington College.  His books include Parapsychology and the Nature of Life (1977) and Psychokinesis: A Study of Paranormal Forces Through the Ages (1982).

David N. Rousseau, BSc (Eng)

David joined the SPR in 1994.  He was co-opted to Council in 1997 and has been an elected member since 2003.  With a degree in electronics engineering, David has specialised in managing large engineering and software projects, and has worked as IT Director for a large company in the semiconductor industry .  He currently holds directorships at Qinexus Ltd and eDocsWorks Ltd.  David is a founder trustee of the Centre for Fundamental and Anomalies Research (C-FAR), whose support enabled the SPR to set up an online library containing the complete collection of JSPR and ProcSPR. He has a long-standing interest in psychical research, has participated in field investigations, and published in the JSPR.  He is currently leading a project to establish an online database of the best evidence for anomalous phenomena.

Julie A. Rousseau, BSc 

Julie is a consultant mathematician with an interest in interdisciplinary and systems approaches to the study of anomalous phenomena.  She has been a member of the SPR since 1994, and was co-opted to the Council in 2002.  She is a co-founder of the Library of Exploratory Science and the SPR's Online Library.

Prof. Archie Roy, BSc PhD FRAS FRSE FBIS

See under Vice President above

Tom Ruffles, BSc BA MA PhD ARPS

Tom joined the SPR in 1987 and has been a member of Council since 1990.  He has served at various times as Hon. Testing Officer, Hon. Appeals Officer, and on the Image, Publicity and Publications Committee.  He was also for some years co-cordinator of the Anglia Paranormal Research Group.  His book, Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife, was published in 2004.                     

Adrian Ryan

Adrian is a freelance business systems analyst for the financial services industry. His interests include the study of the association between ESP, geomagnetic activity and local sidereal time; laboratory experimentation, particularly remote viewing; and experiment design. Adrian is keen to represent the views of younger members of the society and was a co-founder of the psi-in-the-pub network.

Andreas Sommer, MA

Andreas joined the Society in 1995. After studying for a degree in Philosophy with Psychology at the University of Northampton, he is now a postgraduate student of medical history, philosophy of science, and sociology of science at University College, London. His main interests are in the history of psychical research and the impact of some of its proponents (such as Friedrich Zollner and Carl du Prel in Germany, Frederic Myers in England, and William James in the US) in the making of academic psychology, the relationship between exceptional experiences and mental health, and empirical and conceptual problems of hypothetical survival after bodily death. He is founder and secretary of the Survival Research Network and published in Zeitschrift fur Anomalistik, Luce e Ombra, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Spirituality and Health International, the Paranormal Review, PsyPioneer, and Journal of Mind and Behavior.

Zofia Weaver, BA PhD 

Zofia has been a member of the SPR since 1982.  One of her main areas of interest in psychical research is the investigation of famous Polish psychics.  Her paper on the Polish physical medium, Franek Kluski, was published in the JSPR in 1992 and, together with Mary Rose Barrington and Professor Ian Stevenson, she has written a comprehensive study of the Polish clairvoyant Stefan Ossowiecki.  She served as the Editor of the Society's Journal in the years 1999-2002, and currently chairs the SPR's Image, Publicity and Publications Committee.

Prof Donald J. West, MD LittD FRCPsych

See under Vice President above

Melvyn J. Willin, BMus, MMus, PhD, LRAM

Melvyn joined the SPR in ? (can't remember...was it 1066?) and during this time he has published articles in the Journal and Paranormal Review on his two main fields of research, namely, music and witchcraft. (Books were published on these subjects in 2005, 2007 and 2008).  In his role as Hon. Archive Officer he regularly explores and adds to the wealth of material that is housed in the London and Cambridge libraries.  He houses the audio-visual collection at his secure premises and has an in-depth knowledge of its content.  Melvyn is currently (2009) researching the musical perspective of near death experiences as a part-time Perrott-Warrick scholarship.

Officers:

Office Personnel:

Peter Johnson:       Secretary
Eleanor O'Keeffe:   Membership Secretary
Karen Patel:            Librarian