On Monday 22 April 2024, the Department hosted the Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark Prize Lecture in honour of the Department's former Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy.
The lecture, entitled ‘Cardiovascular Ageing: Unravelling the Interplay of Vessels, Nerves, and Inflammation’ was delivered by Professor Stefanie Dimmeler. Professor Dimmeler is Professor of Experimental Medicine (since 2001) and has been Director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Regeneration, Center for Molecular Medicine at the University of Frankfurt since 2008. Her group elucidates the basic mechanisms underlying cardiovascular disease and vessel growth with the aim to develop new cellular and pharmacological therapies for improving the treatment of cardiovascular disease. Ongoing research focuses on epigenetic mechanisms that control cardiovascular repair, specifically non-coding RNAs.
Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark FRS is a figure of great importance in the history of our department and also more widely at the University of Oxford. In 1934 Le Gros Clark accepted the invitation to fill the chair of Dr Lee’s Professorship in Anatomy, one of three named statutory professorships of the University of Oxford. It was a position he occupied until his retirement in 1962. Le Gros Clark had a profound influence on the teaching of anatomy at Oxford, changing it from the routine repetition of the minute details of anatomy to a study of function and its relevance to cell biology and embryology.
Photos below show Professor Dimmeler and members of the department after the lecture, and Professors Dimmeler and Paterson unveiling the bust of Le Gros Clark
