Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery

Biography

I am British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and a Consultant Cardiologist at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Trust. I joined The University of Manchester in April 2013 as Director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences. I was a preclinical student at the University of St. Andrews and qualified in medicine from Oxford in 1988. Following junior clinical posts, I was an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford from 1993 to 1996. I completed training in clinical cardiology and set up my own scientific group in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Oxford 1997-2000 under the mentorship of Hugh Watkins. In 2001 I moved to a Senior Lectureship at Newcastle University, where I founded the Molecular Cardiovascular Research Group. I led the group 2001-2012 as it grew from one PI to nine (including five Chairs and three Programme Grants). I was awarded a BHF Personal Chair in 2008. I have been an active clinical cardiologist throughout my scientific career. Between 2001 and 2013 I practiced as a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist; during most of this time my personal procedure volumes were in the top 10% of all operators nationally. Presently, my clinical focus is on inherited cardiovascular diseases where I am part of an integrated service for affected patients and their families provided with colleagues in Clinical Cardiology and the Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine.

Research Interest

My main research interest is in the genetics of complex cardiovascular diseases. Among contributions my colleagues and I have made to this field are: the first demonstration of limited haplotype diversity over long distances in the human genome (1996); the first success in trans-ethnic fine mapping of a complex genetic trait in man (1998); the first large-scale genetic studies of myocardial infarction (2000-2004); the introduction of the approach known as “Mendelian Randomisation” into genetic epidemiology (2001); several large-scale meta-analyses of genetic associations with myocardial infarction (2005-2008); demonstration of the mechanism involved in the association between MI and its strongest common genetic risk factor (polymorphisms at CDKN2B-AS1 [2010]); demonstration of association between copy number variants in the human genome and sporadic congenital heart disease (2012) and the first published genome-wide association studies of congenital heart disease (2013). My group are now chiefly interested in understanding the functional biology underlying some of the many genetic associations with complex cardiovascular diseases that have been detected in genome-wide association studies (including our own work), and using next-generation sequencing approaches to further define the genetic architecture of congenital heart disease.