Tom Keeley

I received a B.Sc. in Physiology from King’s College London, where I then undertook a Ph.D. in vascular physiology with Professor Giovanni Mann, exploring responses to low oxygen conditions in endothelial cells. After a brief post-doc at KCL, I joined Peter Ratcliffe’s lab in the Nuffield Department of Medicine in Oxford in 2018 to work on novel hypoxia signalling pathways. In 2020, I took up a Junior Research Fellowship in medical sciences at St. Catherine’s College, and in 2025 I moved to DPAG to start my own lab, funded by a BHF Intermediate Basic Sciences Research Fellowship and Wellcome Discovery Award.

My research is focused on understanding how multicellular organisms sense and respond to changes in oxygenation on a variety of different time scales, ranging from seconds to thousands of years. Adaptation to a hypoxic environment occurs within 24 hours of exposure and is coordinated largely by the well-established hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) transcription factor pathway. Preceding this are a range of ‘reactive’ responses to hypoxia which, although well-grounded in canonical physiology, are generally poorly understood at a molecular level. Our work seeks to understand the biochemistry and physiology of immediate and short-term oxygen homeostasis, focusing on two main areas. Firstly, we are interested in a new mechanism of non-transcriptional oxygen sensing coordinated by 2-aminoethanethiol dioxygenase (ADO), the activity of which controls the stability of members of the regulators of G-protein signalling protein family through the cysteine branch of the N-degron pathway. In doing so, ADO couples G-protein signalling to cellular oxygen availability, with important consequences for physiological responses to hypoxia.

Our second area of interest lies in understanding rapid electrophysiological responses in specialised oxygen sensing cell types, on which we collaborate closely with Associate Professor Tammie Bishop. We employ a range of biochemical, molecular and physiological techniques to study these processes across the breadth of physiology, from cultured cells to isolated tissues and whole animals.