Tony Heagerty obtained his medical degree from UCL and his MD in Leicester. He won the International Society of Hypertension Outstanding Young Investigator Award and delivered the Royal College of Physicians’ Goulstonian Lecture. He was Medical Director of the Manchester Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility until 2011. He is a former President of the European Society of Hypertension and the International Society of Hypertension and served as a Member of the British Heart Foundation until 2010. In 2009 he was elected Vice-President of the British Hypertension Society and is currently the serving President He was a Founding Member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and formerly a Member of the Academic Medicine Committee and serves on the Nominations Committee of the Royal College of Physicians. He has editorial board commitments to Hypertension, Journal of Clinical Metabolism & Diabetes, Therapeutic Advances in Cardiovascular Disease, The Open Cardiovascular Medicine Journal, Experimental Physiology, Current Hypertension Reviews, Hypertension, Diabetes and Vascular Disease Research and Blood Pressure. He is a grant reviewer for Health Boards in New Zealand, France, Holland and in the United Kingdom and in 2006 he was the Folkow Lecturer for the European Society of Hypertension and Lecturer of the Year in Belgium. His clinical interests are in high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases and most recently he led the successful application to designate Manchester as a European Society of Hypertension Centre of Excellence and introduced renal denervation in collaboration with the Department of Radiology and the Manchester Heart Centre at Central Manchester Healthcare Trust. He is an international authority on high blood pressure and is regularly invited to give state of the art lectures at international meetings. He holds an Honorary Consultant contract with Central Manchester Healthcare Trust (Manchester Royal Infirmary) and holds regular clinics for the treatment of high blood pressure as well as General and Internal Medicine. He is a member of the Institute of Health Sciences Diabetes and Obesity Research Network and is a Fellow of the High Blood Pressure Council of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Tony Heagerty current research is to look prinicipally at the effects of fats surrounding small arteries and its influence on vascular tone. There is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that the release of substances from fat cells can influence both vascular contraction and relaxation. In pathological states such as obesity and diabetes there appears to be a loss of some of the healthy factors which leads to an increase in arterial contraction and higher blood pressures. Our group was the first to report that in human arteries the bioavailability of adiponectin which is a vasodilator substance released from healthy adipocytes is lost and that this can contribute to an increase in vascular tone and the generation of the conditions that will be predispose to diabetes. We have other projects on-going with regard to the effects of high blood pressure on end-organ damage and the physiological responses to blood pressure in terms of structural reorganisation and its derangement in pathological organisations when blood pressure becomes severe or out of control. Most recently we have highlighted the role of macrophages and eosinophils in influencing the production of adipokines by perivascular fat.