Professor Hugh Watkins
Hugh Watkins is Field Marshal Alexander Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford, Honorary Consultant in Cardiology and General Medicine at the John Radcliffe Hospital, and Professorial Fellow at Exeter College.
After training in medicine and cardiology in London and Oxford, he received a British Heart Foundation clinician-scientist Fellowship to work on the genetics of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Division of Cardiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Over six years his work showed that this 'idiopathic' heart muscle disorder was caused by mutations in contractile protein genes, and that knowledge of these mutations provided previously unavailable prognostic information. This was the first primary cardiac disorder to be understood at the molecular level; its study continues to provide insight into the fundamental processes of contractility and the pathways leading to cardiac hypertrophy, as well as the clinical application of molecular genetic knowledge.
From an assistant Professorship at Harvard he was appointed Head of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford in 1996, where he now runs the Molecular Cardiology Laboratory in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. Professor Watkins is Programme Director for the University of Oxford's 'Wellcome Trust Cardiovascular Research Initiative', one of two such programmes awarded after a national competition. He has launched a multi-centre programme in genetic susceptibility to coronary disease which is one of the largest academic-led genomics programmes. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the British Medical Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Medicine, Circulation and Heart. He represents cardiology on the BHF Research Review Committee and the Committee of the Medical Research Society, and serves on the Dean's Advisory Group and Research Strategy Group of the Oxford Clinical School. Recent honours include the Davidson Lecture (Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh) and the Goulstonian Lecture (Royal College of Physicians of London), and election as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
