Professor Sir Peter John Ratcliffe is Director for the Target Discovery Institute within the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford and is a practicing clinician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. He is Professor of Medicine, member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Nobel Prize for Medicine 2019.

In 1978, Ratcliffe moved to Oxford where he trained in renal medicine at Oxford University, with a particular focus on renal oxygenation. In 1989 he founded a new laboratory in Oxford at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, obtaining a Senior Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to work on cellular oxygen sensing pathways. The lab explored the regulation of erythropoietin – a hormone responsible for stimulating the production of red blood cells, known to be turned on in kidney cells following oxygen deprivation.

The Ratcliffe group helped to uncover a detailed molecular chain of events that cells use to sense oxygen. This same pathway is also disrupted in many tumours, allowing them to create new blood vessels to sustain their growth. Much of our current understanding of hypoxia has emerged from the laboratory of Ratcliffe.

Sir Peter was the Head of the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford 2004-2016. Since 2016 he has been the director of the Target Discovery Institute, University of Oxford, and Clinical Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute. He is a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

In 2019, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for a new discovery on how humans respond to oxygen.