Emeritus ProfessorTimothyWilliams

Summary

Tim Williams is Emeritus Professor in Airway Disease of the National Heart and Lung Institute. Until October 2010, he was the Asthma UK Professor of Applied Pharmacology in the NHLI, and the Head of the Leukocyte Biology Section located in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building (SAF) on the South Kensington Campus. He also served as Campus Dean for the Faculty of Medicine on the Campus.

He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2000, Foreign Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 2007, Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012 and Honorary Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society in 2015.

He obtained a BSc in Physiology at University College London and a PhD in Pharmacology at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology. He was appointed to the Asthma UK Chair in 1988 and was based in the Guy Scadding Building until 1998 when he moved his section to the newly-opened SAF Building.   From 2006-2010 he was Co-director of the MRC & Asthma UK Centre in Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma, a joint venture with Kings College London.

Professor Williams has supervised 28 PhD students and examined 71 during his career.  His research is focused on inflammatory mechanisms with an emphasis on those underlying the recruitment of different leukocyte types to sites of inflammation.  Many of his papers are concerned with the role of chemokines in eosinophil recruitment. More recently he has become interested in mechanisms underlying the population of tissues by mast cells and the chemotactic receptors expressed by mast cell progenitors.

He has published 74 reviews/chapters/editorials and 175 peer-reviewed papers including five in ‘Nature’, one in ‘Science’ and many in prestigious journals such as the Journal of Experimental Medicine.  Several of these papers are highly cited e.g. on the effects of prostaglandins on the microcirculation (two ‘Nature’ papers, 415 and 450 citations), neutrophil-dependent oedema (‘Nature’ article, 818 citations), the vasodilator action of CGRP (two ‘Nature’ papers, 1745 and 268 citations), Eotaxin a potent eosinophil chemoattractant (three J Exp Med papers, 637, 441 and 204 citations). The discovery of Eotaxin also resulted in several patents which generate royalty revenue for the College.

Professor Williams has been invited to speak at many international conferences including plenary talks and opening keynote lectures.  He has given several lectures at FACEB conferences, Keystone Symposia and Gordon Conferences. He has given the Gaddum Memorial Award Lecture to the British Pharmacological Society, the Jack Pepys Lecture to the British Society for Allergy & Clinical Immunology, and the Ulf von Euler Memorial Lecture at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  In June 2011 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich Lectureship at the  Seventh International Eosinophil Society Symposium in Quebec City for the discovery of Eotaxin.

Commercial Activity

Industrial connections

• LeukoSite Inc. Boston, USA, Consultant.
• Pfizer Inc. Groton, USA, Consultant.
• Merck, Rahway, USA, Consultant.
• Rhone Poulenc Rorer, King of Prussia, USA, Consultant.
• Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co. Ltd, Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Japan, Consultant.
• Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Boston, USA, Consultant.
• Astra-Zeneca, Alderly Park, UK, Consultant
• ProtAffin, Graz, Austria, Consultant
• Cambridge Antibody Technology, Cambridge, UK, Consultant

Publications

Journals

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