Professor Alan R Boobis OBE

Alan Boobis received a Bachelor's degree in pharmacology in 1971 from the University of Glasgow (UK). In 1974 he received a PhD degree in pharmacology from the University of Glasgow (UK) working in the area of drug metabolism. His doctoral work involved studies of the influence of changes in hemodynamics in the liver on drug disposition and the effects of lipid peroxidation on P450 integrity. Professor Boobis then worked as a Fogarty Visiting Fellow for two years with Dr Dan Nebert at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD). During this time he studied the effects of modulating factors on benzo[a[pyrene DNA adduction, and was also involved in an investigation of genetic and developmental factors on P450 expression and activity. In 1976 he joined the department of Clinical Pharmacology at what was then the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (London, UK), as an MRC research training fellow. He was then appointed to a tenured lectureship and subsequently promoted to Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology, his current position (at what is now Imperial College London). He is now also director of the Department of Health Toxicology Unit at Imperial College London. His current research interests include mechanistic toxicology, drug metabolism, biomarker discovery in toxicology, using protein-based approaches and inflammatory lung disease, using PET imaging. He has published over 200 original research papers and is an Editor-in-Chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology. He was deputy chairman of the U.K. Advisory Committee on Pesticides (1999-2002) and is a member of a number of national and international grant review and advisory committees, including several IPCS working groups, JECFA, JMPR (which he co-chaired for five years), the UK Committees on Carcinogenicity and on Toxicity, the HPA Board Sub-Committee for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards and is vice-chairman of the EFSA Panel on Plant Protection Products and their Residues. He is chairman of the Board of Trustees and of the Executive Committee of ILSI HESI (until 2010), and is involved in several HESI and ILSI Europe projects. He received an OBE for his work on the risk assessment of pesticides in 2003. He is an Honorary Member of EUROTOX, a Fellow of the British Toxicology Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Biology.