Prestigious appointment for Nottingham professor

A University of Nottingham academic has been appointed to a prestigious new position on an advisory board for the Medical Research Council (MRC).

Professor Stephen Hill, head of the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University, is to take on the role of chair of the MRC Molecular and Cellular Medicine Board (MCMB).

The board — membership of which is made up of some of the most respected scientific researchers in the country — is one of a number of advisory bodies that help to ensure that the MRC’s processes are fair, that it funds the most appropriate, high-quality research which is conducted according to ethical principles, and that its strategic direction is in the best interests of science and the UK taxpayer.

Professor Stephen Hill said: “It is a great honour and privilege to be appointed Chair of MCMB. I thoroughly enjoyed my previous time on the board and my role as Deputy Chair between 2008 and 2011. I look forward to the challenge and hope that I can maintain the very high standards set by my predecessor Professor Paul Luzio.”

Professor Hill joined the University of Nottingham in the early 1980s, initially taking up a position as lecturer in the Department of Pharmacy. In 1984, he moved to the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology (now the School of Biomedical Sciences). After promotions to Reader (1989) and Professor of Pharmacology (1995), he was appointed Director of the Institute of Cell Signalling in 1997.

Professor Hill has published more than 150 papers and his research interests include studying how important proteins in the cell membrane, G protein-coupled receptors, interact with drugs at the molecular level.

He is a founding director of the University of Nottingham spin-out company CellAura Technologies Ltd that provides fluorescent ligands — small drug molecules which have been fluorescently ‘tagged’ — to the scientific community. He has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Pharmacology and Current Opinion on Pharmacology.

He was Vice-President (Meetings) of the British Pharmacological Society (2004-2006) and was the BPS Sandoz (Novartis) Prize winner in 1987 and the BPS Australasian Lecturer in 2006.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society in 2004. According to ISI, he is one of the top 250 pre-eminent individual researchers in pharmacology as measured by citations to their work. He has served on the Wellcome Trust Physiology & Pharmacology Panel and the Wellcome Trust Career Development Panel.