Month: August 2018

Head of the National Heart and Lung Institute

Professor Edwin Chilvers (FMedSci) has accepted appointment as Head of the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) and Chair of Medicine with effect from October 1 2018. Professor Chilvers’ term of office as Head of the NHLI will be for an initial period of five years.

Professor Chilvers is currently Head of the Respiratory Medicine Division at the University of Cambridge and Director of Graduate Education at its School of Clinical Medicine. He qualified in Medicine from the University of Nottingham, was a medical registrar at Hammersmith Hospital before winning an MRC Clinical Training Fellowship, followed by a lectureship and then a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Chilvers has a distinguished career in respiratory research. His main research interests are in inflammatory cell biology and, in particular, the intracellular signals that regulate the activation and survival of white blood cells, with translational relevance to a range of inflammatory lung diseases including COPD, asthma and acute lung injury. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2007, currently chairs the research committee of the British Lung Foundation and was the immediate past-President of the British Thoracic Society. He was awarded a ScD by the University of Cambridge in 2016.

Interim Head of Department of Surgery and Cancer

Professor Mark Thursz, Professor of Hepatology, has accepted appointment as Interim Head of the Department of Surgery & Cancer with effect from 1 August 2018, until a permanent successor to Professor Jeremy Nicholson has taken up appointment.

Professor Thursz joined the College in 1991 as a research fellow and was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1997. He was promoted to Professor in 2006. He was previously Deputy Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer and will retain his roles as Clinical Director of Integrative Systems Medicine and Digestive Diseases and Director of the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre at the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

Professor Thursz’ research is focused on viral hepatitis and alcohol related liver disease. His early work on genetic susceptibility and natural history of viral hepatitis identified a number of factors which determine clinical outcomes. He is also renowned for his translational research in alcoholic hepatitis and has recently acquired an MRC Stratified Medicine award to explore novel biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis and risk of infection in this condition.