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John Danesh

Current Roles

Since 2001, John Danesh has been the Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine and Head of the 330-person Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. He is also Director of the Strangeways Research Laboratory, Director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit, and Honorary Consultant in Epidemiology for the Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. 

 Departmental Role

Professor Danesh has overseen major expansion in recent years of the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, which is one of Europe’s leading university departments of population health sciences. The department was top-ranked in Epidemiology and Public Health in the UK Research Assessment Exercise 2001-2008. Major developments in the department in recent years have included:

  • Establishment of a Centre for Genetic Epidemiology in 2003
  • Establishment of the MRC Centre for Nutrition and Cancer in 2006
  • Partnership in the National Institute for Health Research School for Primary Care Research since 2006
  • Establishment of major research initiatives in developing countries, and partnership in the Public Health Foundation of India-UK Consortium from 2008
  • Establishment of major collaborations with several industrial partners
  • Establishment of a new MPhil course in Public Health in 2006, and co-direction of a new four-year interdisciplinary PhD programme in cardiovascular research supported by the British Heart Foundation from 2009
  • Establishment of a new Behavioural Research Unit in 2010.

Background

John Danesh trained in medicine at the University of Otago in New Zealand and at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia.  As a Rhodes Scholar, he trained in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine andat the University of Oxford. He was elected to his present position at the University of Cambridge in 2001. He was awarded Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 2007 and of the Faculty of Public Health, London in 2009. In 2011, he was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award.

Research Interests

Professor Danesh leads a research group of over 50 staff and students and is an international leader incardiovascular disease epidemiology, focusing on genetic, biochemical and lifestyle factors. He has authored over 130 publications, over 60 of which have appeared in leading clinical (eg, NEJM, JAMA, Lancet), scientific (eg, Nature, Nature Genetics) and specialty journals (eg, Circulation, Am J Epidemiology). These publications have attracted a total of over 10,000 citations to date. He is PI (or Joint PI) of several major international researchprojects, such as the 2 million person Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration, EPIC-CVD, and the Pakistan Risk of Myocardial Infarction Study.

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