Professor Peter Sleight, Emeritus Fellow in Cardiovascular Medicine, has been awarded a European Society of Cardiology Gold Medal at the ESC Congress 2010 in Stockholm.
The Gold Medal recognises exceptional doctors for their contribution to medicine, holding them up as an inspiration to fellow doctors and scientists. The Congress is the biggest Cardiology meeting in the world, and was attended this year by over 30,000 professionals.
Professor Sleight is one of the founders of multicentre trials in cardiology and was appointed to the first ever British Heart Foundation chair at Oxford. He told the ESC that the Gold Medal has given him enormous personal satisfaction, adding: “The thing that really matters in science is the recognition of your peers.”
Professor Sleight is currently collaborating with Luciano Bernardi from the University of Pavia, exploring the effect of music on the circulation. Their work, which has shown that music with faster tempos uniformly results in increased breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, while slower music causes declines in heart rates, may open the door for using music therapeutically.
