Dr. Garret FitzGerald is the McNeil Professor in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he chairs the Department of Pharmacology and directs the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics. FitzGerald’s research has been characterized by an integrative approach to elucidating the mechanisms of drug action, drawing on work in cells, model organisms, and humans.

His work contributed substantially to the development of low-dose aspirin for cardioprotection and the market withdrawal of a potentially heart-damaging drug, Vioxx. He has also discovered many products of lipid peroxidation and established their utility as indices of oxidant stress in-vivo.

He runs the FitzGerald Lab – the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics through the Department of Systems Pharmacology. The laboratory has two primary interests: eicosanoid biology and molecular clocks. His laboratory staff were the first to discover a molecular clock in the cardiovascular system and studied the importance of peripheral clocks in the regulation of cardiovascular and metabolic function. FitzGerald’s group was the first to predict and then mechanistically explain the cardiovascular hazard of NSAIDs.

FitzGerald has received the Boyle, Coakley, Harvey, and St. Patrick’s Day medals, the Lucian, Scheele, and Hunter Awards, and the Cameron, Taylor, Herz, Lefoulon-Delalande, and Schott-Stein Prizes. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Irish Society. In 2014, he was the inaugural Healthcare and Life Sciences 50 Keynote Speaker.

Originally from Greystones, County Wicklow, he studied for his medical degree at the University College in Dublin, continued his postgraduate studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and his Masters of Science at the University of London, and became the founding director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. ♦