Peter Ratcliffe

Biography

Peter Ratcliffe is a physician scientist who trained in medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, before moving to Oxford to specialise in renal medicine. After studying the physiology of renal circulation, he became interested in the regulation of the haematopoietic growth factor erythropoietin, which is produced by the kidneys in response to reduced blood oxygen availability.  In 1990, with funding as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow, he set up the Hypoxia Biology laboratory in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford. Peter was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society and to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2002. He is a member of EMBO and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work on oxygen sensing has won a number of awards including the Louis-Jeantet Prize in Medicine, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research. He was knighted for services to medicine in the New Year's Honours, 2014.

Research Interest

Peter's current research aims to understand the biological roles of signalling through protein hydroxylation and related oxidations. he became interested in the regulation of the haematopoietic growth factor erythropoietin, which is produced by the kidneys in response to reduced blood oxygen availability.