Peter J Ratcliffe, MD is a physician scientist who trained as a nephrologist, before founding the hypoxia biology laboratory at Oxford. His laboratory elucidated mechanisms by which human and animal cells sense oxygen levels and transduce these signals to direct adaptive changes in gene expression.
Ratcliffe received his degrees from the University of Cambridge and medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London and the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of several international awards for his laboratory’s work on oxygen sensing, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research. He was knighted for his services to medicine in 2014 and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019. In 2012 he gave The Physiological Society’s Annual Review Prize Lecture, in Edinburgh, with a lecture entitled “Oxygen sensing in animals”.
He holds appointments as Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute and Director of the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford and is a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.