Professor Peter Barnes FRCP, FCCP, FMedSci, FRS

Peter John Barnes is a British respiratory scientist and clinician, a specialist in the mechanisms and treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He is currently Margeret Turner-Warwick Professor of Thoracic Medicine at the National Heart & Lung Institute, previous head of respiratory medicine at Imperial College, and honorary consultant physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital London.

He qualified at Cambridge and Oxford Universities (first class honours) and was appointed to his present post in 1987. He has published over 1000 peer-review papers on asthma, COPD and related topics and has edited over 40 books. He is also amongst the top 50 most highly cited researchers in the world and has been the most highly cited clinical scientist in the UK and the most highly cited respiratory researcher in the world over the last 20 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007, the first respiratory researcher for over 150 years. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee of global guidelines on asthma (GINA) and COPD (GOLD). He also serves on the Editorial Board of over 30 journals and is currently an Associate Editor of Chest, Journal of COPD Foundation, Respiratory Editor of PLoS Medicine and Editor in Chief of Up-to-Date Pulmonary Diseases. He has given several prestigious lectures, including the Amberson Lecture at the American Thoracic Society, the Sadoul Lecture at the European Respiratory Society and the Croonian Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians. He has received honorary MD degrees from the Universities of Ferrara (Italy), Athens (Greece), Tampere (Finland) and Leuven (Belgium). He is an Emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator,a Master Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and a member of the Academia Europaea. He was President of the European Respiratory Society. He co-founded an Imperial spin-out company RespiVert, which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson and has developed novel inhaled treatments for COPD and severe asthma.

His research is focused on cellular and molecular mechanisms of asthma and COPD, understanding and developing therapies and research into biomarkers for these diseases. He is involved in multidisciplinary translational research which integrates basic science with clinical studies, thereby providing novel insights into common airway diseases.

Professor Barnes is the author of over 1,000 publications in peer-reviewed journals[16] and is one of the most highly cited scientists in the world. He has edited or co-edited over 50 books on asthma, COPD, and respiratory pharmacology. His Web of Science h-index is over 170 with over 140,000 citations.

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