Piers Nye graduated from Oxford in 1968 in Agriculture and then studied first International Agricultural Development then Nutrition and finally Physiology at the University of California, Davis where he won the Loren D Carlson Prize for his doctoral work on the sensory nerves of birds.  In 1977 he came back to Oxford to work as an MRC Research Assistant with Bob Torrance and Dan Cunningham on the control of breathing in mammals - particularly on the mechanism of excitation of arterial chemoreceptors for which he built a high frequency, computer-controlled ventilator that allowed him to drive alveolar and arterial gas tensions through precisely repeatable waveforms to average the random discharge of carotid body chemoreceptors.  He was appointed to a Wellcome Senior Lectureship in 1984 and to a University Lectureship in Physiology in conjunction with a Tutorial Fellowship at Balliol College in 1991.

For several years Piers transferred his interest in the hypoxic excitation of the carotid body to similar mechanism in the blood vessels of the lung and for this he developed setups and means of analysis for studying isolated lungs, blood vessels and to a certain extent isolated smooth muscle cells.  The most important piece of work to come out of this was the demonstration that, contrary to received wisdom, pulmonary vessels need neither their endothelium nor extracellular calcium nor artificial preconstriction to give essentially 'normal' responses to hypoxia.  All they lose when the endothelium and/or extracellular calcium are removed is a slow phase during which the contractile mechanism becomes sensitised to calcium.  So the mechanism that constricts the pulmonary vascular smooth muscle (of the rat) is resides overwhelmingly within smooth muscle cells.

In the past few years Piers has spent most of his time organising the non-medical Physiological Sciences course, teaching Medics, Physiologists and Human Scientists and running Medical and Physiological Sciences at Balliol.  He has however also been collaborating with Professor Abe Guz on a project studying cardiorespiratory responses during the first few breaths of exercise.  For this he has developed computer programs for the analysis and display of experimental results.