On Monday 16 October 2023, the Department hosted the annual John Burdon Sanderson Lecture. This year's lecture, entitled Realizing The Promise of Cardiac Neuromodulation: Clinical & Laboratory Insights Paving the Path, was given by Olujimi Ajijola, Associate Director of UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia Center & EP Programs and Associate Professor of Medicine-Cardiology at the University of California: Los Angeles. He is a practicing interventional cardiac electrophysiologist and his research career has been dedicated to basic/translational investigation into the neural mechanisms of cardiac dysfunction and ventricular arrhythmias having trained in Medicine at Duke University, followed by his clinical residency at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He completed his PhD at UCLA and Fellowship examinations in cardiology and clinical electrophysiology.
Head of Department David Paterson commented that ‘Dr Ajijola’s outstanding lecture to faculty and medical students on the emerging field of neurocardiology illustrated how the gap is being bridged between cardiology and neurology where he demonstrated the importance of neural targeting to treat cardiac arrhythmias’.
The Burdon-Sanderson lecture series is dedicated to John Burdon-Sanderson (1828 - 1905), the Physiologist who reported that Penicillium inhibited the growth of bacteria in 1871, although he is best known for recording the first cardiac action potential on an isolated. In 1882, Burdon-Sanderson became the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology here at Oxford, and a year later, under Burdon-Sanderson's direction, the Department of Physiology was established at Oxford.
