Garret A. FitzGerald, MD, is the McNeil Professor in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he chairs the Department of Pharmacology and directs the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (www.itmat.upenn.edu). Dr. FitzGerald trained in medicine in University College Dublin and its teaching hospitals and in statistics at Trinity College in Dublin and the London School of Hygiene. Following fellowships at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and at Vanderbilt. Dr. FitzGerald joined the faculty at the last institution and eventually led the Division of Clinical Pharmacology as the William Stokes Professor of Experimental Therapeutics. He returned in 1991 to lead the Department of Medicine and Experimental Therapeutics at University College, Dublin and then returned in 1994 to the US to take up direction of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and the General Clinical Research Center as the Robinette Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Penn. These structures were subsumed into ITMAT when it was founded in 2004, anticipating the funding of Clinical and Translational Research Centers by the NIH. ITMAT has grown to over 650 members and supports research programs, faculty recruitment, education and infrastructural developments relevant to translational research. Dr. FitzGerald’s research has been characterized by an integrative approach to elucidating the mechanisms of drug action, drawing on work in cells, model organisms and humans. His work contributed substantially to the development of low dose aspirin for cardioprotection and was the first to predict and then mechanistically explain the cardiovascular hazard from NSAIDs. He has also discovered many products of lipid peroxidation and established their utility as indices of oxidant stress in vivo. His laboratory was the first to discover a molecular clock in the cardiovascular system and has contributed substantially to our understanding of the importance of peripheral clocks in the regulation of cardiovascular and metabolic function. Dr. FitzGerald’s papers have been published in journals such as Cell, Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, JAMA, PNAS, the JCI and Nature Medicine and have been cited ~30,000 times. He has also published on science policy in the lay and professional press and is an occasional sports commentator for Il Manifesto. He has been awarded honorary degrees from University College Dublin and the Universities of Edinburgh and Frankfurt and amongst his awards are the Harvey Medal, the Boyle Medal, and the Cameron Prize. Dr. FitzGerald serves on the Peer Review Advisory Committee of the NIH, the Science Board of the FDA and the Drug Forum of the Institute of Medicine.

Garret A. FitzGerald, MD
University of Pennsylvania