Peter Ratcliffe is Nuffield Professor and Head of the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford. He heads the hypoxia biology laboratory at the Henry Wellcome Building for Molecular Physiology and has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts in hypoxic signalling and related fields. In 2002 he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, He was awarded the 2009 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the 2010 Gairdner Award for his work on mechanisms in cellular oxygen sensing.