Board Member, Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA)
Ole Petersen graduated in Medicine from the University of Copenhagen. Following appointments as Professor and Head of Physiology Departments at the Universities of Dundee and then Liverpool, he took up his current appointment as Professor at Cardiff University in 2010 and became Director of its School of Biosciences, as successor to the Nobel Laureate Sir Martin Evans FRS. As one of the world’s leading physiologists, working on the control of secretion, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2000 and served as Vice-President (2005-2006). His 1984 Nature article on ‘Calcium-activated potassium channels and their role in secretion’ is an ISI (now WoS) ‘Citation Classic’. He was elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2010 and gave the Leopoldina Lecture in 2012. He was a Founding Member of Academia Europaea in 1988 and is currently Vice-President of the Academy. He will receive the Academy’s Gold Medal at the 2021 Annual Meeting in October. He served as Secretary General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (2002-2010), as European Executive Editor of Physiological Reviews (2003-2012) and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the American Physiological Society’s new flagship journal FUNCTION. He received the American Physiological Society’s most prestigious prize, the Walter B Cannon Memorial Award and gave the Plenary Award Lecture at Experimental Biology 2018 in San Diego. He is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), having received this award from Queen Elizabeth II, at Buckingham Palace in 2008 for ‘Services to Science’.