Professor Anant Parekh FRS FMedSci MAE
Anant Parekh was a medical student at Oxford University, where he obtained his undergraduate and doctoral degrees, both at University College. He then moved, initially as an Alexander Von Humboldt Scholar, to the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, where he worked in Professor Erwin Neher’s department with Professor Walter Stuehmer and then Professor Reinhold Penner. He moved back to Oxford (Physiology) in 1997 as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow and Sir Edward Abraham Research Fellow at Keble College. He was subsequently awarded a Lister Institute Senior Research Fellowship, the Amersham Medical Fellowship at Keble College and then the Monsanto Senior Research Fellowship at Exeter College. In 2002, he was appointed to a proleptic University Lectureship (Physiology Department) and Tutorial Fellowship (Lady Margaret Hall). In the same year, he was awarded a personal chair.
Professor Parekh’s research interests are on intracellular calcium signalling, how changes in calcium can engender a wide range of cellular responses and how the signal can be hijacked to cause diseases such as asthma. He was awarded the Wellcome Prize in Physiology in 2002, the India International Foundation Prize in 2009, the GL Brown Prize (2012) and the Annual Prize Lecture (2023) from the UK Physiological Society. He is a member of Academia Europaea (2002), is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2012) and the Royal Society (2019).
