William Cookson is Professor of Genomic Medicine at Imperial College London and Head of Respiratory Sciences for the College. He is Head of the Asmarley Centre for Genomic Medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute. He won a Joint Wellcome Senior Investigator Award with Professor Miriam Moffatt in 2011, and was elected to the College of NIHR Senior Investigators in 2013. Professor Cookson initially trained as a respiratory physician, before receiving a D.Phil. in human genetics at Oxford in 1994. He was a Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford between 1998 and 2004. Over the past twenty-five years he and Miriam Moffatt have developed a successful research group devoted to understanding the genetic causes of asthma (Zhang Y. et al., Nature Genetics 2003; Allen M. et al., Nature Genetics 2003; Moffatt M. et al., Nature 2007; Moffatt M. et al., New England Journal of Medicine 2010). Many of the genes identified by these studies are concentrated in the airway epithelium, so that asthma is now recognised as a disease of the airway mucosa. Genes identified by the group such as ORMDL3, IL33, TSLP and IL18R1 are the focus for new asthma therapies.

Genomics, Respiratory Sciences