Lawrence J. Whalley FRCPE (12 March 1946 – 11 April 2024) was a British psychiatrist who was the Crombie Ross Professor of Mental Health in the University of Aberdeen, from 1992 to 2008.
Together with Ian Deary and John Starr, he began prospective studies of cognitive decline and vascular risk factors in 1300 healthy old people in Edinburgh.
In 1997, with the assistance of the Scottish Council for Research in Education, he was granted access to a unique national archive of childhood IQ data (N~160,000) that could be used to estimate lifelong cognitive variation.
Whalley is best known for follow-up studies of 757 Aberdeen City and Shire residents who took part at age 11 years in the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947.
Whalley's popular science account of "The Ageing Brain" (Phoenix Press, 2004, published in the U.S. and translated into Spanish, Italian and Japanese) describes some of his research findings on brain structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, nutrition, genetics and physical health and how these explain differences in individual rates of aging of some mental abilities while others are relatively preserved.
In 2010 he was appointed until 2020 to the part-time staff of the University of the Highlands and Islands with the remit to develop a community-based dementia research program relevant to a rural community.