Dr William D Man

William Man is Consultant Chest Physician and NIHR Clinician Scientist at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and the National Heart & Lung Institute.

He qualified from Imperial College with a 1^st class Honours BSc and Distinction Honours in MBBS. He went on to train in Respiratory and General Internal Medicine in London, and has received specialist training from some of the country’s leading teaching hospitals including the Royal Brompton Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital, St.Mary’s Hospital and King’s College Hospital.

His clinical practice is based at Harefield Hospital, and involves the assessment of patients with advanced Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and other chronic lung disorders for pulmonary rehabilitation. His team also provides specialist rehabilitation for patients who have undergone lung transplantation, those who have had curative lung cancer surgery as well palliative exercise therapy for those with metastatic lung cancer. Dr Man runs a tertiary service for COPD patients and for patients with sleep disorders such as Obstructive Sleep Apnoea, and is lead for the Harefield Hospital Smoking Cessation clinic.

Dr Will Man’s major research interests are the causes and treatment of skeletal muscle dysfunction in patients with COPD. Dr Man heads the Muscle Laboratory at Harefield, which focuses on research in pulmonary rehabilitation and understanding the link between quadriceps muscle function and exercise capacity in patients with chronic lung disease. He received a PhD (2007), funded by a MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship, and supervised by Professor John Moxham and Professor Michael Polkey. His thesis entitled “Influence of Respiratory and Peripheral Muscle Function on Exercise Capacity and Dyspnoea in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease” was successfully defended without any corrections, and resulted in seven first author publications, all in journals with an impact factor greater than 5 as well as several other co-authored publications.

In 2006, he received the prestigious European Respiratory Society COPD award for “outstanding contribution to COPD research in Europe”. In 2008, against stiff opposition, Dr Man won one of five National Institute for Health Research Clinician Scientist awards for clinicians who show exceptional promise for research. He works closely with Professor Michael Polkey, and together with other investigators based at King’s College Hospital and at St Thomas’ Hospital make up the London Respiratory Muscle Group which has undertaken a considerable body of collaborative research. Dr Man also collaborates closely with Dr Paul Kemp in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying skeletal muscle dysfunction in COPD. Dr Man’s work has been funded by the MRC, the Wellcome Trust, the British Lung Foundation, the National Institute for Health Research and the Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit.

Dr Man currently serves on the Science and Research Committee of The British Thoracic Society, and is responsible for organising the Winter Meeting – the primary academic respiratory conference in the UK. He has been an expert referee for all the major respiratory journals, including the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Thorax, European Respiratory Journal and Chest.