ProfessorAndrewBush

Summary

Prof Andrew Bush is the Professor of Paediatrics and Paediatric Respirology, National Heart and Lung Institute, and Consultant Paediatric Chest Physician, Royal Brompton Harefield NHS Foundation Trust.

When it became clear that he had failed to inherit a single one of his father's musical talents, Professor Bush went into medicine as a more promising career. He trained at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and University College Hospital, London. He did his house jobs at Stafford General Infirmary (where he caused a scandal by cohabiting with his own wife) and University College Hospital, London. After SHO and Registrar posts in adult medicine, he obtained the MD degree in The Department of Clinical Physiology, as a British Heart Foundation Junior Fellow supervised by Professor David Denison, in the field of pulmonary circulatory physiology.

The research program became more and more paediatric, with increasing research interests in the circulatory physiology in the context of congenital heart disease, under the supervision of Dr Elliott Shinebourne, and so he then went into paediatrics, training initially at University College Hospital and Hillingdon Hospital and then training in Paediatric Respiratory Medicine with Professor John Warner at the Brompton Hospital, and Professor Mike Silverman at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School. He was appointed Consultant and Senior Lecturer in Paediatric Respirology in January 1991, and was made Professor at Imperial College in 2002.

His research interests include the invasive and non-invasive measurement of airway inflammation in children, in particular the use of endobronchial biopsy in the management of severe asthma, and also respiratory mass spectrometry. Thanks to the many people whom he has been lucky enough to count amongst his collaborators, he has raised more than £70 million in peer review grants and donations, including being Chief Investigator leading a £4.64 million Wellcome Strategic award (2016). He has supervised 36 MD and PhD degrees, authored more than 550 papers in peer review journals, and written more than 100 chapters in books and monographs. He has co-edited 10 books, and is currently working on the 9^th edition of Kendig’s Disorders of the Respiratory Tract in Children. He has been Deputy Editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (the highest impact factor respiratory journal, the only Deputy Editor from outside North America), and Head of the Paediatric Assembly of the European Respiratory Society. He was the Joint Editor in Chief of Thorax, then the 2nd ranked chest journal in the world, and top-ranked outside North America, the first paediatrician to hold this post. He has been Visiting Professor overseas on ten occasions and delivered fourteen named lectures, including the 2007 Charles West Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians. He was 2008 Jonxis Medallist, University Hospital of Groningen, Netherlands.

He was appointed an NIHR Senior Investigator in 2011, renewed in 2015. Also in 2011, as a result of a Watergate-like conspiracy by his present and past trainees (more than 50 of whom currently occupy senior academic and clinical positions), he was awarded the Rector’s Award for Excellence in Research Supervision as well as the Rector’s Medal in Research Supervision. In 2016 he was appointed a non-Executive Director of the AHSC, representing Imperial College.

When not plying his trade in Paediatrics, Professor Bush enjoys family life with his wife (with whom he still cohabits, scandal or not), reading (especially when he is supposed to be being sociable), ball games (in particular on the rare occasions when England actually win something), and listening to music (after being given an ASBO for his last attempts at performance). He shows no signs of fulfilling any domestic responsibilities or of growing old at all gracefully. 

Best of all, he has five sons and five daughters by combinations of birth, marriage and acquisition, and he is the grandfather of Dylan and Jack, and Oscar and the twins Aya and Fletcher, Lydia and Dominic, and Ilyas the eight most beautiful and intelligent children in the known Universe.

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