AGNIR Member: Professor Denis Noble

Denis Noble was educated at University College London where he obtained his PhD in 1961, supervised by Otto Hutter. This thesis concerned the first computer modelling of the heart and was published in two articles in Nature in 1960. He moved to Oxford in 1963 as Fellow and Tutor in Physiology at Balliol College. From 1984 to 2004 he was the Burdon Sanderson Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, University of Oxford, a chair financed by the British Heart Foundation. His research is focussed on using computer models of biological organs and systems to interpret function from the molecular to the whole body levels. With its international collaborators, this team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart. As Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS), he played a major role in launching the Physiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret the genome. In July 2009 he became the President of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS).

Denis Noble has been active internationally in defending the International Council for Science's principle of the free circulation of scientists. He is an amateur linguist and has lectured or delivered speeches in French, Italian, Occitan, Japanese, Korean and Maori.

Last reviewed: 15 April 2010