Ole H Petersen, CBE, MAE, ML, FRS
Ole Petersen is currently Professor of Physiology at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. He held the George Holt Chair of Physiology at the University of Liverpool from 1981 – 2009 and before that (1975-1981) the Symers Chair of Physiology at the University of Dundee. He pioneered patch clamp single channel and whole-cell current recordings in epithelial cells, discovering hormone-evoked, messenger-mediated ion channel activation and voltage-activation of epithelial ion channels. These data led to the first model of how ion channels control exocrine fluid secretion (Petersen & Maruyama Nature 1984 [ISI [WoS] Citation Classic]; Petersen J Physiol 1992). He discovered sub-cellular Ca2+ spiking in epithelial cells (Thorn et al Cell 1993) and intracellular Ca2+ tunnels (Mogami et al Cell 1997). More recently, he demonstrated the crucial role of Ca2+ release channels and store-operated Ca2+ entry in Acute Pancreatitis (Gerasimenko et al PNAS 2009), provided proof-of-principle for Ca2+ release-activated Ca2+ (CRAC) channel blockade as a treatment of severe Acute Pancreatitis (Gerasimenko et al PNAS 2013) and discovered an important role for pancreatic stellate cells in this disease (Gryshchenko et al J Physiol 2016; Ferdek et al J Physiol 2016). Ole Petersen was elected Fellow of The Royal Society in 2000, Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2010 and gave the Leopoldina Lecture in 2012. He received the Nordic Insulin Foundation’s Jacobaeus Prize (1994), the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Purkyne Medal (2003) and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. He was awarded The American Physiological Society’s Horace W Davenport Distinguished Lectureship and delivered the Award Lecture at Experimental Biology in Boston, USA 2013. In 2017, he was elected Honorary Member of the German Society for Gastroenterology, Digestive & Metabolic Diseases. Very recently, The American Physiological Society has elected him to give the 2018 Walter B Cannon Memorial Award Lecture (the APS top award) at Experimental Biology in San Diego on 22nd April 2018.