On Becoming An Impactful Researcher
Being a genuinely impactful researcher is not always about publishing success. What drives researchers to keep the fire burning is contributing to the achievement of concrete progress. In this very first episode of Beyond Publications podcast, we are fortunate enough to get Peter Barnes. He is one of the highest-ranked scientists based on publication impact metrics, so it is a bit ironic to have him here. Peter talks about his unique approach to translational research and how he remains a pragmatic project manager focused on making real progress. He also reveals his secrets as a successful researcher by sharing inspirational and practical tips on transforming a medical field.
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Listen to the podcast here
On Becoming An Impactful Researcher
Welcome to the Beyond Publications podcast. I'm your host, Scott Wagers. This is the first episode. I'm excited and I'm also honored to have the guest that we have. You'll enjoy it. He is somebody that I always have a great time when we have a conversation, whether that's at a meeting or another setting. The person is Peter Barnes. If you’re in the respiratory field, there was certainly a time when Peter was the unequivocal thought leader, researcher in respiratory medicine.
To get to some of the details, he got his Doctor of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He rose to become an established Chair in 1987 at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College, and stayed there until 2017. He's one of the most cited scientists in the world not just in respiratory medicine, which is quite remarkable.
The other remarkable thing he's done, which is also very challenging, is began a spin out from Imperial College and got acquired by another major pharma. He’s not only producing great research, but making translational steps. You’ll learn what he's passionate about and continue to be passionate about is understanding of mechanisms and disease, and that's what drives him.
It's a great episode, regardless of where you're at in your career, both with some surprising aspects such as how we ended up doing research in respiratory medicine, to some ideas from mentoring to how you get things done, what you should be doing, what you should be reading, all the typical things. Even though, ironically, to start this whole Beyond Publications podcast off, if somebody who's one of the most highly published individuals, there's a lot in here about what it means to be a scientist beyond just publications. I hope you'll enjoy. I would like to hear your comments, feedback, and suggestions for others.
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Thank you, Peter, for coming and being the first guest on this new version of our show. It's going to be about performance and leadership in life sciences and healthcare innovation. I was happy when you said you'd agree to join because there's probably nobody in my mind, at least when I started out my career, you were one of the biggest leaders. If you look obviously as from your introduction, you had an h-index of 153 at one point, which puts you in the top 50 of all scientists in the world, which is quite remarkable. I want to ask you some questions. I heard that despite having achieved that great success in research, you didn't want to get into research. You were actually forced into research. Can you tell us about that a bit?
This is an interesting story because it's probably applicable to many clinicians. I was wanting to become a general physician. I was on a training program going through different specialties: cardiology, gastroenterology, endocrinology. I did some pulmonology. I was keen to be a general physician because I worked for an inspirational man called John Stokes at University College Hospital in London, who is a brilliant clinician. He knew about every disease. I thought this was something to aim for.
The next stage in getting a permanent post and clinical medicine is to go from a registrar where you may do many specialties to choose a particular specialty. It's a post called a senior registrar post in those days. It bridges a general training with becoming a consultant. I didn't have any particular area that I was interested in. I wanted to do all clinical areas. I would apply for many posts as a senior registrar. I applied to one in cardiology, one in gastroenterology, and one in endocrinology. I never could get any of these posts. One came up in pulmonology, and I applied for it. As expected, I didn't get the post, but the consultant in charge of the department was Neil Pride at Hammersmith Hospital.
Neil phoned me at home after the interview and said, “You're not going to get a senior registrar post unless you do some research.” I said, “I don't want to waste my time on research. I didn't see any value in this. It delays getting a consultant post.” He said, “I know you feel like that because you haven't been exposed to research. I know that Colin Dollery in Clinical Pharmacology at Hammersmith is looking for someone to do some research on asthma. Do it for six months and see how it goes.” I did take out this post with Colin Dollery, and I got into asthma research. I was looking at catecholamines like adrenaline in the circulation of people with asthma because someone had developed an assay for the first time to measure this in humans.
I got excited about doing research and finding out things that no one had ever discovered before. For example, no one had ever measured the adrenaline in the blood of people with asthma, although adrenaline had been used as a treatment for asthma since 1900. It was extraordinary to find this new information that no one had ever found. I got addicted to research. I was keen to continue. I've been in research ever since, because it can be exciting to find new things. It's a wonderful thing for people to do. I was only doing it because I was forced to do it in order to progress my career.
That's a fascinating story considering how much success you went on to have. Maybe we can start with what is the lowest point of your research career? Was it the beginning or some other point?
Probably the lowest point was the time I just described when I couldn't get a job to progress my career. It was quite difficult in those days because there was great competition for each post. It was quite stressful because I thought I might never be able to become a specialist, and I'd have to become a GP or something that was not working in a hospital setting. That was quite a low point. Anyone who does research has low points quite often when you get papers rejected, grants rejected. You have to overcome these things. It's something that young researchers have to learn, is that along with the excitement of new discoveries, come a lot of disappointments that you have to get through.
Impactful Research: It's quite important for those who want to pursue a career in translation research to have a mentor you could discuss problems with.
Did you get through them, those kinds of disappointments? What do you think? What do you tell yourself?
One thing that's important in my own career was to have a mentor that you could discuss problems with. My mentor was Neil Pride, who was the person who got me into research, who is a world-leading physiologist. More than that, he had a great understanding of clinical and translational research, and a wise man. In fact, he’s the most intelligent person I've ever met in my life. He was a fantastic person to talk to about problems. He got me through a lot of things.
It does raise the issue of the importance of having a mentor who is going to guide you. It is not the same as a supervisor of your research, but someone that you can talk to about problems and get advice about future directions. I'd say that's the single most important thing. The other thing is that you have to work hard and get through these difficult times.
How did you get that relationship as a mentor with him? Did you go and asked him? Did it just happened spontaneously? How did that come about?
It happens spontaneously. In those days, people didn't even call themselves mentors. It was never anything official. It was that he was a wise person who was open to discussion. I worked with him. I was supervised by Colin Dollery in the actual research. I talked to Neil about my research, and particularly when problems arose. He was wise at guiding me in these matters. Now, it's much more formalized. At Imperial College, there are officially appointed mentors for people to talk to.
Do you think that's a good way of doing it or do you think that might be too state or too limiting?
It depends on how people work. It's always helpful to talk to people that are not directly linked to your research about what you're doing, because that gives you some perspective that may be difficult for your supervisor to have because they have more rigid objectives.
“If you didn’t have problems with your medical research, you probably wouldn’t be doing it very well.”
When you talk about problems, was it scientific problems or was it all kinds of problems that you talked about?
It was all kinds of problems. Particularly, problems related to work like having papers rejected. This is disappointing for people. You have to deal with it and send the paper somewhere else. Everyone deals with that. Also, having grants rejected is particularly annoying because you put in so much work, and you think it's the best thing you can do and that it should be funded. When it's rejected, it's always a big problem.
There are problems about the research itself when you don't get the results you expect to get, but that's an opportunity as well, because by things not working out or getting unexpected findings, that helps you to find new things and takes your research in another direction. I'd say that having difficulties in research is part of the normal pattern. You should expect that to happen. If you didn't have problems, you probably wouldn't be doing the research well.
Do you like having problems? The people that like the problems are the ones that stick with it and try to solve it.
You always hope you're going to find something easily, but if it was that easy, someone would have found it before you. You'd expect a challenge. The whole point of research is to find new things that hadn't been found by other people. That's what I was interested in doing rather than confirming what someone had already done.
That's what drove you. Now we can maybe shift to where you're at now. What excites you the most about what you're working on or what you're doing now?
I'm working on COPD mechanisms for many years now. The area that we're particularly excited about is understanding cellular senescence as a driving mechanism for COPD. The evidence is growing that COPD is acceleration of normal lung aging with accumulation of senescent cells. These senescent cells release a lot of inflammatory mediators that drive the progression of the disease.
Impactful Research: It's always helpful to talk to people that are not directly linked to your research. They are the ones that give you some perspective.
We've been interested in how these pathways lead to cellular senescence in COPD. It was probably driven mainly by oxidative stress from cigarette smoking and from existing inflammation. That drives a cell into cellular senescence. These senescent cells are important because they persist in the lungs. They're releasing a lot of inflammatory products.
The other thing that's been found in senescence research in other organs, and almost certainly is true in the lung, is that senescence spreads. It's going from cell to cell. We think that that can account for progression of COPD. Probably, it starts in the small epithelial cells and then spreads to fibroblasts and to other epithelial cells. The disease gets progressively worse.
The other thing is that senescence spreads outside the lung and may lead to co-morbidities. As you know, most people with COPD have co-morbidities. These are usually also diseases of accelerated aging and mediated through the same pathways that we see in COPD. The exciting thing that we've discovered is that senescence is spread by extracellular vesicles, which are released from senescent cells. These vesicles contain a MicroRNA called 34a. The vesicles are taken up by other cells, which then become senescent because they take in the 34a, which induces senescence.
What we found is that these vesicles can spread senescence. That's important because it might be a way of targeting cells in COPD, putting drugs in the form of vesicles that these cells are going to take up, but it also may be a biomarker for COPD because you can measure vesicles in the sputum and bronchoalveolar and even in the circulation, because it's a way of sending RNA around the body in a protected form. This is an exciting area because it gives us insight into how COPD progresses and why you have all these co-morbidities linked to COPD.
Knowing what I do know about COPD, it always impresses me the story that you put together. I'd be interested to know how you build that up. Is it something you build up over time? Do you sit and think with other people? How do you come to that? One of the things I've been impressed when I see you talk is that story that comes across.
The approach I always took from the beginning is to try and work across different methods, from molecular biology, to cell biology, to clinical studies and clinical trials, for example. I've always emphasized the importance of using human cells to try and understand human disease. Luckily, for lung diseases, at least for airway diseases like asthma and COPD, it's relatively easy to get cells from people with disease. These are common diseases, so it's not difficult to find the right samples. This is much easier than areas like cardiology and neuroscience where it's much more difficult to obtain relevant cells that you need to study the disease. I think it’s working across several methods.
The other thing is that it's important for clinicians and basic scientists to work together. I've always tried to do that in my research. In our department, we always had approximately 50/50 mixture of scientists. Whether these are non-clinical scientists and clinical scientists, they’re all scientists. That gives you much greater insight into disease. We know that many mouse and animal models of lung disease are inappropriate and you get misleading findings. It's important where possible to try and do this in the human disease. I would encourage people to do that despite the greater challenges than doing things in mouse studies and cell lines.
“You always hope you’re going to find something easily. But if it was that easy, someone would have found it before you.”
In other words, it's more difficult in a way, but it's probably the better way to go. That connection between the basic scientist and the clinician, it's interesting because that's what inspired me to do research I did during my medical school. I worked with an oncologist who had a basic scientist in the lab. They worked closely together. That was a fascinating way of working. How do you make that work? Do you meet together? Do you talk about things? Do you do the projects? What makes that relationship functional?
It’s working together in a lab. You have clinicians and scientists working together. It's important for the basic scientists to understand the clinical questions that were important and to be used to working with clinical samples. It's also important for clinicians to understand basic science if they want to understand the disease. They need to work together and be equally valued. Some clinicians in the past would look down on basic scientists as if they were technicians in a way. That's wrong. They're equally important and can work together. In translational medicine where you try and link basic research to clinical findings is important in lung research.
Do you have regular lab meetings where you discuss results?
Yes. The way that I used to organize the department when we had it was that we would have separate groups with a group leader, and they would have several people in a team. They would have meetings at least every week discussing their results. We'd have a weekly meeting where all the groups come together. Different groups would learn about the research going on in other groups, so that everybody knew what each other were doing. We called them research and progress meetings. They are important.
There was a rotor where people had to present their results, whether they had any results or not. Not having results is quite useful because people explain why they have no results, and other people could help them. Meetings are important. We also used to have journal clubs where people looked at recent publications and discuss them, and discuss whether anything was relevant to their research. It's important to have these meetings. We also used to have regular social events together so that people would get to know each other.
How did you come to that structure of small groups and then connecting the small groups with meetings? Was it something that everybody already did. Was it something you found was particularly useful?
When I started, I was working in Colin Dollery’s department in Clinical Pharmacology. They had similar structures. I suppose I followed that pattern. I spent a year in San Francisco in Jay Nadal’s department. They also have a similar structure. It's the best way, so that people know what each other are doing. People can then help each other if they're in difficulties. People, otherwise, may not know that a method may be already set up within the department that they could use or get help with.
Impactful Research: Clinicians must understand basic science if they want to understand the disease. They need to work together and be equally valued.
It's important that people do have these meetings and that people are open about the problems. A lot of people, when they wanted to present the final findings before they publish a paper that we said, “No, if you're on the road, you have to present whatever you have when it's your turn.” You learn a lot more from things that are not working.
That's a great insight. That's one thing I've seen in cross-organization consortium projects when people start doing that same thing. It's quite revealing sometimes. They present the new stuff. It's also interesting because if you look at network theory, there's a thing called small world networks, which is how the internet is organized, where you have small groups tightly connected, and then they connect to each other. That's how you make a robust structure because you can only interrelate with a few people. Having some connection to the others helps you bring all the bigger group together. It's fascinating. Sometimes we forget that's been a long-standing way to do science. Sometimes that falls apart. That's interesting. I want to shift and ask you, what is a question we should be asking ourselves about the future of medicine right now?
Medicine is going to be difficult to fund in the future because there's going to be increasing demand. That goes back to our interest in aging. People are living longer. That means they have more chance to develop diseases related to aging. They often develop many of these diseases at the same time or connect in a connected way. They end up with multi-morbidity.
I would say the biggest challenge to medicine in the future is multi-morbidity of the elderly because this is involving many different chronic diseases occurring together, which raises issues about diagnosis and treatment. That's why it would be good to have more research into the underlying mechanisms of age-related diseases. If you have common pathways for age-related diseases, which you probably do have, then you can envisage that there would be common treatments so that something that would treat accelerated aging and lung disease would also treat atherosclerosis, type 2 diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, which are diseases that often occur together in multi-morbidity of the elderly.
What would your vision of that future be in terms of how we treat disease that you get one pill that solves all their problems?
Maybe there will be one treatment that can deal with many diseases, but you may need specific treatments for particular diseases like bronchodilators for airway disease, for example. To treat the underlying disease process that leads to airway obstruction, you may have the same treatment that would work in atherosclerosis. There are some treatments that are being developed now called senolytic therapies, which destroy senescent cells. That stops them producing inflammatory mediators because they're gone, but also stops them spreading so that diseases stop progressing.
In animal models of chronic diseases like atherosclerosis, chronic kidney disease, and some neurological diseases, they found that senolytic therapies are remarkably effective. This has also been shown in animal models of pulmonary fibrosis. These senolytic treatments have enormous potential for the future. They've been given to humans now and are relatively safe. The idea is that they would only need to be given infrequently maybe once every few months or once a year to clear out senescent cells. By getting rid of senescent cells, you allow progenitor cells to replace them because senescence or progenitor cells are susceptible to senescence, which means they stop regenerating and repairing tissue.
“The biggest challenge in the future of medicine is the multimorbidity of the elderly.”
If you can get rid of senescent cells, the remaining progenitor cells can then proliferate. What you can see in animal models is reversal of diseases like emphysema, which is extraordinary. No other treatment could reverse structural diseases like emphysema. I'm optimistic that there will be completely new approaches at least to treating chronic diseases, which are by far the biggest drain on medical resources.
Particularly, if we do get successful at anti-aging, it's going to be even more of a bigger problem. It's clear that you have a nice vision for where medicine needs to go. What does it mean to you to be a leader in your field?
It means a lot of traveling, that’s for sure. There are several aspects to it. You need to have some set of leadership in a research field so that you're doing something new that people follow. It means having a high profile in meetings, giving presentations, participating in discussions and workshops. It means publishing in journals that people are going to read and having publications that are important. One thing I found useful is writing review articles, because there were a lot of work, but they're helpful because it means that you review the literature in great detail, so you know exactly what is going on.
People read reviews if they're about topics that are important. They cite them. Something else about writing reviews is important or was important to me was that it identifies areas where there's a lack of knowledge where you may think that everything is known about the topic, but when you review it, you see there are enormous gaps in knowledge. By identifying them, you can then see where research should be going in the future. That's a useful purpose of writing reviews.
It's almost as if even the act of writing the review is where the value lies, whether it gets published or not, to be honest.
Even if it's not published, it's been a valuable exercise.
That's a great point because anybody can write a review. It is one of those things. The knowledge that we have is deep and complicated that it's clear from times that a lot of it is lost because it's out there. That comes to the question, do you think we're lacking future leaders?
Impactful Research: Writing reviews identifies areas lacking of knowledge.
People probably always thought that in every generation because the next generation haven't yet become those people. There are a lot of people who are going to be good leaders and already are. I'm not worried about that. It was always difficult to attract people into respiratory research because it was poorly funded and it still is compared with other areas such as cardiovascular neuroscience research, where it's much easier to get funding. There's still a poor public understanding of lung diseases, which means that there's little charity funding compared with areas like cardiology.
In the UK, for example, the main characters were the Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, which have now combined together. The amount of funding is minute than what you would see in cardiovascular and neuroscience research. This is something that may discourage people from going into respiratory. That's why you do need to have leadership that's going to attract people.
Inspire people.
It's tough, and it still is. Surveys that have been done in the UK, it's not that different than other countries, have shown that respiratory medicine has the biggest discrepancy between the disease burden and the amount of funding allocated to it.
Do you do anything to try to address that? Obviously, writing good papers is one thing, but are there other things you do as a leader in the field to try to change that dynamic?
It's difficult to change it. We need to have much better public awareness of the importance of lung diseases and the need for more research in order to find better treatments. I ran an ERS meeting, which I've forgotten the name of it. They have it every year, the presidential topic or something like that. My topic was the need for new drugs and respiratory disease because there were fewer new drugs. I mean new classes of drugs, not new beta agonists and new classes of drug for respiratory.
There were less in any other field in internal medicine and yet, the amount of money that respiratory drugs make is considerable. There was an enormous discrepancy in the investment in drug discovery and the amount of money that was being made from drugs, which again goes back to the poor perception of lung diseases.
“You need to look outside your medical discipline to see what’s happening in other areas.”
It's one thing too, the prevalence of asthma and COPD alone is high. When you look at the numbers, there are a lot of people that need therapy.
Asthma is probably the commonest chronic disease in the world. COPD is the third ranked cause of death in the world, yet almost no funding compared with other areas.
Getting back to your role as a leader, what is something that you do when nobody else is looking that enhances your performance as a leader?
I always work hard because you do have to work hard to keep up with things. You have to read the literature and know what people are doing. That background work is important. People don't see that.
That qualifies. It's something that you think about but you probably can never do enough of that. As the knowledge expands more and more, there's even more and more. The senescence, do you focus on that particularly or do you focus on COPD?
You obviously focus on the thing that you're working on. In my case, it's senescence and COPD. One thing that's important that I learned early on is that you need to look outside your discipline to see what's happening in other areas. I give an example of that as one of the areas of research that I was involved in early on was the role of neuropeptides in regulating airway functions. There was little work on neuropeptides and lung disease when I started the work, but there was a lot of work in other areas, especially gastroenterology and neuroscience.
You can read about research in other fields and learn a lot that could then be applied to the respiratory field. Respiratory research tends to lag behind other fields, which is linked to the lack of funding, but you can see what's happening in other fields. This is certainly true in senescence, which has been important, especially in cancer research and in neuroscience where they've done a lot of work on senescence long before people started looking at this in lung disease.
Impactful Research: The evidence is growing that COPD is acceleration of normal lung aging with accumulation of senescent cells, which release a lot of inflammatory mediators that drive the progression of the disease.
You read articles then for the most part. Do you read books or something else, or is it mostly articles that you read?
I suppose it's journals that I’m mainly reading, and that includes general journals like The New England Journal of Medicine, which is a good journal for medicine to see what's going on in other fields. You need specialist journals because you need to know what's happening in your own field, but it's also important to look at general journals. Also, the journals like Nature and Science, you can flip through and see if there's anything relevant to what you're doing because these are the advanced research going on in biology.
Do you read every article in The New England Journal? Do you sit down and read everything?
No, I just flip through it and see if there's anything that looks interesting.
One question is if you were to be able to advise a younger version of yourself, what would you tell yourself knowing what you know now?
The first thing is back where we started saying that you need to do research to know about it. You have to read a lot and you have to work hard. There's no substitute for those things. It's not easy research. If you're going to find something new, it's a challenge because otherwise, someone would have already found it. That's why adopting new techniques is a good thing.
One of the first things I set up when I started research was a new technique at the time called radioligand binding, which was a way of measuring receptor numbers. I started with beta-2 receptors because they were the ones relevant to bronchodilators, which was what I was working on at that time. No one had looked at radioligand binding in lungs. It was mainly done in the CNS at that time.
I was lucky when I started to have a cardiologist from San Diego called Joel Karliner joining the department at the same time as I did in Colin Dollery’s department. Joel was interested in beta receptors in the heart and I was interested in beta receptors in the lung. We worked together and got the assay set up and particularly encouraged by the fact that Colin Dollery said, “This is far too difficult. You'll never be able to do it.” We thought we will show him that we can, and we did.
Another aspect of being a leader is being ambitious. We always say it can happen. That's probably a guidepost in a way. It also strikes me that people say publications are the currency of medicine or research, but I think it's the methods because that's what you're going to trade with somebody else like you described to both write nice papers together and go across disease areas.
Methods are important. If you can develop a new method or at least adapt a method that's developed for something else, then that gives you a big advantage because you can do something that no one else could measure. Another example from when I went to San Francisco, I worked with a wonderful anatomist called Carol Basbaum. She was an expert in autoradiography. I adapted radioligand binding of beta-2 receptors to autoradiography so that we could see where the beta-2 receptors were in the lung. No one have ever done that before. They had done it in the brain, but they've never done it in the lung. What we found was extraordinary that the high density of beta-2 receptors in the lung was because there's a huge density of beta-2 receptors around the alveolar wall, which was unexpected.
That's unexpected and interesting. I asked you about the younger version of yourself. What about somebody who's now, either a post-doc or just starting out as a junior faculty? What advice would you give them?
A good advice is to go and work overseas in a lab that's doing something a bit different from what you do so that you can learn new techniques. That's good because you get to go and work in another place in another country. I worked at the Cardiovascular Research Institute in San Francisco at Jay Nadal’s group. The other thing that's a major advantage of that is that you meet lots of other people. When I was at CVRI, I met lots of people who were working there at the same time. You develop a network of people from those links. If you're not an English speaker, of course it's a great advantage to go to work in an English-speaking laboratory in order to learn fluency in the language.
Besides reading a lot, it's about techniques and network.
Networks are important. Everyone finds that networks are important because you get to meet a lot of new people that have different views on things. You become very good lifelong friends.
This has been great. There are great insights and stories that you've brought out. I want to give you the floor for the last minute for anything else you want to bring up about leadership, about the future of medicine, anything at all.
One thing that I'm still keen about is that we have more people in clinical respiratory medicine who understand basic science. That's a great opportunity for people in lung research because of accessibility to disease, cells, and tissue. If you have an opportunity to do research, I strongly advocate that people try and do some research in a wet laboratory where you can work with basic scientists. That is a great opportunity for people to then understand more about the clinical disease.
It makes a good point as well because the bottlenecks I've seen sometimes is getting access to the samples you need. You're right, in pulmonary, there's no reason why. It’s that relationship between the clinic and the research. You need to be able to get it and you need to have that interaction. Thank you very much, Peter. I learned a lot. It's a great way to start this off. Thanks for your time.
It's great to talk to you, Scott.
Important Links
About Peter J Barnes
Peter Barnes is a Senior Research Investigator at the National Heart and Lung Institute and Honorary Consultant Physician at Royal Brompton Hospital, London.
He qualified at Cambridge and Oxford Universities (first class honours) and was appointed to his present post in 1987. He has published over 1000 peer-review papers on asthma, COPD and related topics and has edited over 40 books (h-index = 153). He is also amongst the top 50 most highly cited researchers in the world and has been the most highly cited clinical scientist in the UK and the most highly cited respiratory researcher in the world over the last 20 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007, the first respiratory researcher for over 150 years. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee of global guidelines on asthma (GINA) and COPD (GOLD). He also serves on the Editorial Board of over 30 journals and is currently an Associate Editor of Chest, Journal of COPD Foundation, Respiratory Editor of PLoS Medicine and Editor in Chief of Up-to-Date Pulmonary Diseases. He has given several prestigious lectures, including the Amberson Lecture at the American Thoracic Society, the Sadoul Lecture at the European Respiratory Society and the Croonian Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians. He has received honorary MD degrees from the Universities of Ferrara (Italy), Athens (Greece), Tampere (Finland) and Leuven (Belgium). He is an Emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator,a Master Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and a member of the Academia Europaea. He was President of the European Respiratory Society 2013/14. He co-founded an Imperial spin-out company RespiVert, which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson and has developed novel inhaled treatments for COPD and severe asthma.
His research is focused on cellular and molecular mechanisms of asthma and COPD, understanding and developing therapies and research into biomarkers for these diseases. He is involved in multidisciplinary translational research which integrates basic science with clinical studies, thereby providing novel insights into common airway diseases.
