Peter J. Ratcliffe

Professor of Clinical Medicine, Nuffield Department of Medicine
2019 Laureate in Physiology or Medicine
University of Oxford

Peter John Ratcliffe was born in Lancashire, England, in May 1954, and attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School before winning a scholarship in 1972 to study medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, completing his MB BChir degree with distinction at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, London, in 1978. He then studied renal oxygenation at Oxford University, before gaining his MD degree at Cambridge in 1987.

Ratcliffe performed his Nobel-winning work with EPO at his laboratory in Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Medicine. He received a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship to study hypoxia and from 1992 to 2004 was Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Medicine at Jesus College, Oxford. In 2003, he was made head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at Oxford.

Knighted in 2014, Sir Peter is also a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has several other awards, including sharing the 2016 Lasker Award with Kaelin and Semenza. He is a Distinguished Scholar of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, Director of Oxford University’s Target Discovery Institute, and Clinical Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute in London. In 1983 he married Fiona Mary MacDougall, with whom he has two daughters and two sons.