Associate Professor

I started my scientific career as a Biochemistry student at the University of Bath (1978-82), during which I spent six months working at a Home Office Forensic Science Research Laboratories in Aldermaston, as well as six months working in Dusseldorf at a pharmaceutical firm, Beecham-Wulfing. After completing a PhD at Bristol (1982-85) in the Department of Pharmacology, I worked as a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Neuromorphology of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry (now Neurobiology) in Martinsried near Munich (1985-1988). I conducted two post-doctoral fellowships sponsored by the Wellcome Trust in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Nottingham (1988-1993) and became a lecturer in the same Department in 1993. This was converted to a School of Biomedical Sciences and is now a School of Life Sciences, in which I hold a role as Associate Professor in Molecular Pharmacology. I have taught students of medicine, pharmacy, neuroscience, biochemistry, biomedical sciences and nursing for 30 years, mainly about the molecular mechanisms of drug action. In 2013, I launched, and acted as Course Director for 11 years, an MSc in Drug Discovery, which is delivered jointly with the School of Pharmacy, accredited by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I’ve co-authored two editions of a textbook (FastTrack Pharmacology, Pharmaceutical Press). and was a first awardee of the British Pharmacological Society’s Rang Award “in recognition of a contribution to the teaching of Pharmacology and to the maintenance and development of Pharmacology as a discipline”. I was elected a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society in 2013 and an Honorary Fellow in 2025. I am Chair, since 2015, of the Nomenclature Committee of IUPHAR, the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology, which coordinates nomenclature of all the pharmacological targets. A major output from the NC-IUPHAR collaboration with the British Pharmacological Society and the Wellcome Trust has been the freely-accessible online database at www.GuideToPHARMACOLOGY.org. I am an Editor of BJP’s Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY, as well as other nomenclature guides since 1997, with >60 publications accumulating >13 000 citations. I have been a Senior Editor of the British Journal of Pharmacology since 2012 (an Editor since 2004) and an Associate Editor of Pharmacological Reviews (since 2004).