Burdon Sanderson Lecture 2019
The annual John Burdon Sanderson Lecture, in honour of the English Physiologist, after whom the Cardiac Centre is named, will be held on Monday 14 October 2019.
The John Burdon Sanderson Lecture 2019 is to take place on Monday 14 October at 4pm in the Large Lecture Theatre, Sherrington Building.
In 1871, Sanderson reported that Penicillium inhibited the growth of bacteria, an observation that placed him amongst the forerunners of Alexander Fleming. In 1882 he was then appointed as the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology here at Oxford. In the same year, he was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society in recognition of his research into the electrical phenomena exhibited by plants, the relations of minute organisms to disease, and of his services to pathology and physiology. A year later, under Sanderson's direction, the Department of Physiology was established at Oxford.
The talk held in his honour, entitled Cardiovascular diseases and drugs: hiPSC models moving forward, is due to be given by Professor Christine Mummery from Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands.
Christine Mummery studied physics at the University of Nottingham, UK and has a PhD in Biophysics from the University of London. After positions as postdoc and tenured group leader at the Hubrecht Institute, she became professor at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in 2002. After a sabbatical at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in 2007, she introduced human iPS cells to the Netherlands. In 2008, she became Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology. Her research concerns heart development and the differentiation of pluripotent human stem cells into the cardiac and vascular lineages and using these cells as disease models, for safety pharmacology and drug discovery. Immediate interests are on developing biophysical techniques for characterization and functional analysis of cardiovascular cells from hPSC. In 2015 she became guest professor at the Technical University of Twente to develop organ-on-chip models. She was recently awarded a multimillion grant for this purpose and is awardee of a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant.
She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW), and board member and incoming president of the International Society of Stem Cell research (ISSCR); she is also former board of the KNAW and the Netherlands Medical Research Council (ZonMW). She was awarded the Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives in research, has co-authored a popular book on stem cells “Stem Cells: scientific facts and Fiction” (2nd edition 2014) and is editor in chief of the ISSCR journal Stem Cell Reports. She is also on the editorial boards of Cell Stem Cell, Cardiovascular Research and Stem Cells.
Following the lecture, there will be a drinks reception in the Sherrington reception foyer at 5pm.
All members of the University are welcome!