The Physiological Society’s Board of Trustees is delighted to announce the appointment of three new Honorary Fellows:
• Professor Rose Anne Kenny MD FRCP FRCPI FRCPEdin FESC FTCD FFPHMI (Hon) MRIA D.Sc. h.c, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Professor Philip Nolan MB BCh BAO BSc PhD MRIA, Science Foundation Ireland (CEO-designate Research Ireland), Ireland
• Professor David Paterson DPhil DSc, University of Oxford, Oxford UK
Honorary Fellowship is the highest honour that The Physiological Society presents to an individual and it recognises persons of distinction in science who have contributed to the advancement of physiology.
Professor David Attwell, President of The Society said:
This year’s Honorary Fellows represent the true breadth and diversity of the discipline. It is a pleasure to recognise their unique achievements and contributions to the physiological sciences.
The Fellowship appointments will be celebrated at the 2023 Member Forum, which will be held at The Royal Society on 1 December 2023.
Professor Rose Anne Kenny MD FRCP FRCPI FRCPEdin FESC FTCD FFPHMI (Hon) MRIA D.Sc. h.c
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Regius Professor of Physic, Professor of Medical Gerontology Trinity College Dublin and Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing, St James’s Hospital Dublin
Rose Anne Kenny is Regius Professor of Physic (Medicine) and holds the Chair of Medical Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin. She is the founding Principal Investigator of The Irish LongituDinal study on Ageing (TILDA) and Director of the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA) at St. James’s Hospital, where she is also director of a large national falls and syncope and autonomic function laboratory.
TILDA includes extensive research of physiological determinants of the ageing process as a measure of biological ageing.
She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, London and Ireland, a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine Ireland, and was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She has received a number of international awards and has published widely, authoring over 600 publications including, her recently published book “Age Proof – The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life” which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022. In 2020, she was elected President of the Irish Gerontological Society. In 2022 she was nominated 24th Regius Professor of Physic at TCD (1637), the first female nominee.
Professor Philip Nolan MB BCh BAO BSc PhD MRIA
Science Foundation Ireland, Dublin, Ireland
Professor Philip Nolan is a native of Dublin, Ireland. His childhood scientific interests ranged across astronomy, electronics, biology and medical sciences. He was the first member of his family to have the opportunity to attend university, and in choosing between science and medicine, felt he was not clever enough to be a successful scientist, and opted for the certainty of gainful employment offered by a medical degree. However, during his second medical year, he attended an open day in the Department of Physiology at University College Dublin (UCD), including a visit to the laboratory of Professor Ronan G O’Regan, where recordings were being made from carotid chemoreceptor and baroreceptor afferents. This led to his decision to complete an intercalated B.Sc. in Physiology, including a project on the effect of airway carbon dioxide on the discharge of sensory receptors in the laryngeal mucosa. Philip thus earned degrees in Physiology (1988) and Medicine (1991) at UCD. He returned to UCD to complete a PhD under the supervision of Ronan O’Regan on the role of upper airway sensory receptors in the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.
Philip was appointed to the academic staff of the Department of Human Anatomy and Physiology at UCD in 1996, where he was fortunate to work with and be inspired by outstanding colleagues including Paul Mc Loughlin, James F X Jones and John B Moynihan. He won UCD President’s Awards for both Research and Teaching. His research interests remained in the areas of upper airway sensation and motor control, and cardiorespiratory control, in animal models and in humans, with a focus on understanding sleep apnoea, including important collaborations on signal processing and modelling with electronic engineers.
He became involved in higher education leadership from 2003, when he was appointed Director of the UCD Conway Institute for Biomolecular and Biomedical Research in 2003, before becoming Vice-President Academic and Deputy President at UCD in 2004. He was President of Maynooth University from 2011 to 2021, a period which saw unprecedented growth and diversification of teaching and research, and a doubling of the research capacity of the University. During 2020 and 2021, Philip was centrally involved in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland, as a member of the National Public Health Emergency Team, chairing its disease modelling subgroup and synthesising scientific advice on the management of the pandemic.
He was appointed Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Irelands primary funder of science and engineering research, in January 2022, and May 2023, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD, appointed Philip the CEO-designate of Research Ireland, the new research funding agency to be formed by the amalgamation of SFI and the Irish Research Council. He is a strong advocate for the importance and value of fundamental curiosity-driven research across all disciplines as the foundation of a thriving research and innovation ecosystem. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and an Honorary Fellow of The Physiological Society.
Professor David Paterson DPhil DSc
University of Oxford, UK
David Paterson is Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Since 2016 he has been Head of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics at Oxford (QS Ranked 1st) and is immediate Past President of The Physiological Society. He is a graduate of the University of Otago (NZ), University of Western Australia and New College, University of Oxford where he completed his DPhil on chemoreception. Rising through the ranks at Oxford from a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church then Tutorial Fellowship at Merton College, he became Professor of Physiology over 20 years ago. As a cardiac neurobiologist, he is best known for his work linking the nervous system to heart rhythm, which was featured in the 2012 BBC Four documentary Heart v Mind: What Makes Us Human?
He served as Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Physiology (2008-11) and The Journal of Physiology (2011-16) and has played a major role in academic publishing. In 2018 he co-authored with Neil Herring the text book Levick’s Introduction to Cardiovascular Physiology, 6th edition. Today, he is the European lead on an $8m transatlantic network of excellence grant from the Leducq Foundation that is focused on neuromodulation therapy and diagnostics.
David Paterson is an elected Member of Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe), and an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of New Zealand and in 2023 will receive an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Western Australia (HonDUniv in Medical Sciences).