The Society is delighted to announce that Professor Mike Tipton MBE, FTPS will become The Society’s President-Elect in 2025.
Professor Tipton is currently serving The Society as a Trustee and Chair of the Policy Committee. His one year term as President-Elect will begin in December 2025 at the annual Member Forum. This will be followed by a three-year term as President beginning in late 2026.
Professor Tipton said,
“It is a tremendous honour to be able to serve The Physiological Society as President- Elect, and to promote it, physiology and physiologists. Physiology should be a critical part of the collaboration addressing many global issues from health to climate change.”
He continued, “With two new journals on the near-horizon and the upcoming Society’s 150th birthday and next strategy on the more distant horizon, we are entering an exciting and transformative period for The Society. I look forward to meeting and hearing from many members moving forward, and to supporting Professor Annette Dolphin in her presidency”.
Professor Tipton is a physiologist specialising in human and applied physiology, based at the Extreme Environments Laboratory (EEL), University of Portsmouth. Educated at the Universities of Keele and King’s London, he joined the University of Surrey in 1986. After 12 years at the Robens Institute and European Institute of Health and Medical Science, he moved to the University of Portsmouth in 1998. In addition to his University positions, Tipton was based at the Institute of Naval Medicine (INM) from 1983 to 2004 and was Consultant Head of the Environmental Medicine Division of the INM from 1996.
The research of Professor Tipton and his colleagues at EEL examines the physiological, pathophysiological and psychophysiological response of those entering extreme environments and their selection, preparation, protection and treatment. He is particularly interested in the areas of drowning, thermoregulation and survival in the sea – an interest that was sparked by the statistic that immersion-related deaths claim at least 1000 lives a day around the globe, and many of those who die are young people. The application of this research has involved Tipton working with groups such as: The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI); HM Coastguard, MoD and other government agencies; various multinational industries; elite sport; and various charities. The resulting outputs, all founded on physiology, include: the description of “cold shock”, “autonomic conflict” and “circum-rescue collapse” on immersion in cold water; the development of protective equipment including an award-winning emergency helicopter underwater escape breathing aid (“Air Pocket”); new UK and USA search and rescue guidelines for survival time in water; and the RNLI “Float to Live” international public health drowning prevention campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_xTYSPseUc). Professor Tipton was awarded the MBE in 2018 for services to physiological research in extreme environments.
Tipton published his first paper in The Journal of Physiology in 1986, he has been a member of The Physiological Society since 1997 and a Fellow since 2017. He has been Editor in Chief of Experimental Physiology (2016-2022) and, since 2021, a Trustee of The Physiological Society and Chair of the Policy Committee.
Professor Tipton and his wife, Carole, live in Cornwall and have two adult children.