Personal Chair: David Wyllie

Professor David Wyllie has been appointed Personal Chair in Ion Channel Physiology and Pharmacology.

Professor Wyllie graduated in Pharmacology from the University of Glasgow in 1988.

He then moved to University College London (UCL) to undertake his PhD, which focussed on the single-channel properties of ion channels activated by the central excitatory neurotransmitter, glutamate.

In 1992 he moved to the University of California, San Francisco, as a NATO/SERC postdoctoral fellow.

He returned to UCL in 1994 to take up a position as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, where he remained for five years and pursued research on structure function and single-channel analysis of NMDA receptors.

The study of this subtype of glutamate-gated ion channel has been the central theme of Professor Wyllie’s research since he joined the University of Edinburgh in 1999.

He was appointed initially to the Department of Neuroscience and then, in 2007, to the Centre for Integrative Physiology.

His current collaborative research programme includes studies of ion channel function in stem-cell-derived neurons, the involvement of NMDA receptor subtypes in mediating neuronal excitotoxicity and the roles played by glutamate-gated ion channels in fragile X syndrome and other disorders that lead to intellectual disability.