Paul Riley

Paul Riley took up the Chair of Development and Cell Biology in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics on 1st October 2011, having been awarded a British Heart Foundation Personal Chair of Regenerative Medicine to support this position.  He is also director of a recently established BHF Oxbridge Centre for Regenerative Medicine. He was previously Professor of Molecular Cardiology at the UCL-Institute of Child Health, London, where he was a principal investigator within the Molecular Medicine Unit at UCL-ICH since 1999.  Prior to this, he obtained his PhD at UCL (1992-1995) and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Toronto, Canada and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford (1996-1999). In 2008, Professor Riley was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Council on Basic Sciences.  The award recognises a landmark discovery in the field of basic cardiovascular science when his team found that Thymosin b4 could mobilise dormant cells from adult epicardium to form new blood vessels in the heart, a major step towards finding a DIY mechanism to repair injury following a heart attack. Currently Professor Riley's team are focusing on exploiting the full potential of activated epicardial cells towards regenerating adult heart and understanding the mechanisms of activation of this lineage to extrapolate to human patients suffering from cardiovascular disease.