Professor Alun D Hughes

Alun Hughes was appointed chair in Clinical Pharmacology in 2001. He currently also holds a visiting professorship in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Professor Hughes completed his medical degree (MB, BS) at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in 1983 having obtained a 1st class intercalated BSc degree in Physiology in 1979. He was awarded a PhD from the University of London in 1988 for his work on vascular dopamine receptors. Subsequently  he was a Medical Research Council Training Fellow at  St George's Hospital Medical School, a British Heart Foundation Intermediate Fellow at Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine and Senior Lecturer/Reader at Imperial College London.

His work focuses on the structure and function of the cardiovascular system in health and disease. Previous achievements have included the identification of tyrosine phosphorylation as a regulator of calcium channels in vascular smooth muscle,defining the mechanism of the vasodilator action of thiazide diuretics on the vasculature and the application of wave intensity analysis in man. More recently, he has extended his interests into developing novel imaging and computational methods for the assessment of haemodynamics and cardiovascular function in man in vivo and their application to large scale clinical trials and epidemiological studies, such as Southall and Brent Revisited (SABRE),  the Anglo Scandinavian Cardiac Outcomes Trial (ASCOT), the Lifelong Health & Ageing: National Survey of Health and Development and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).

Professor Hughes was President of the European Council for Cardiovascular Research from 2008-2010, and is currently a faculty member and hononary Professor of the Danish Cardiovascular Research Academy (DaCRA).