page_title: Department of Pharmacology, University College London
section_title: The heads of department since 1983.
hierarchical_section_title: Department of Pharmacology, University College London / The Department of Pharmacology / After 1983 / The heads of department since 1983.
caption_attribution_description: English: Professor David Colquhoun
context_page_description: The Department of Pharmacology at the University of London, the first of its kind in England, was founded in 1905 and remained in existence until 2007.
context_section_description: After Rang's resignation, the Chair of Pharmacology became vacant.  The Head of Department from 1983 to 1987 was Donald.H Jenkinson  He had done his PhD under Bernard Katz. in UCL's famous Department of Biophysics, and was yet  another member of staff who had been invited to join the Department by Heinz Schild.  During his tenure the Middlesex Hospital Medical School was merged with UCL's, including the two Departments of Pharmacology.
  During the 1980s the traditional role of Heads of Department was replaced by rotating headships that were no longer associated necessarily with an established chair.  Established chairs were, de facto, abolished as part of the move to corporatise universities.
  David Colquhoun FRS was appointed to the established chair in 1985. It was subsequently dubbed the A.J. Clark chair, in honour of Clark's role in the establishment of quantitative pharmacology.  His work, with statistician Alan Hawkes and Bert Sakmann (Nobel prize 1991) established the department as the world leader in the theory and experiment of single ion channels. After retiring from the A.J.Clark chair in 2004, he worked on the misinterpretation of p- values and its contribution to the irreproducibility that has come to light in some areas of science.
  D. A. Brown FRS was appointed in 1987 as head of department (he had previously held the same position at the School of Pharmacy). In 1987, the merger with the Middlesex Hospital Medical School was completed  and David Brown inherited the  title Astor Chair of Pharmacology from Professor F Hobbiger who had held that title at the Middlesex.
  Brown's appointment was intended initially to be the start of a 5-year rotating headship, but when Colquhoun's turn became due, he decided that the job of Head of Department would not allow enough time to do the algebra and program development with which he was involved.  Donald Jenkinson likewise declined to take another turn. Luckily David Brown agreed to continue and he remained Head of Department until 2002.  His tenure saw a second merger, this time with the Department of Pharmacology at the Royal Free Medical School, headed by Professor Annette Dolphin, FRS. David Brown is renowned for his discovery of the acetylcholine (muscarinic)-sensitive potassium channel (M channel).
  The Wellcome Lab for Molecular Pharmacology 
  The growing importance of molecular biology led Brown & Colquhoun to apply to the Wellcome Trust in 1990. They funded the building of the Lab for Molecular Pharmacology  which Colquhoun directed until his retirement in 2004.
  Trevor G. Smart became Head of Department in 2002, with the title of Schild Chair of Pharmacology.  He also works in the ion channel field. After the demise of the Department in 2007. Smart became head of the new Research Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology.
  Stuart Cull-Candy FRS. Stuart G. Cull-Candy works on glutamate-activated ion channels. He joined the Department from UCL's Department of Biophysics and holds the Gaddum Chair of Pharmacology.
  Lucia Sivilotti was appointed to the A.J. Clark chair in 2014.  She has run the UCL Single Ion Channel group after Colquhoun's retirement in 2004. She  continued and greatly extended the work in the field of single channel kinetics. She owns the web site OneMol.org.uk where the group's analysis programs and publications can be downloaded.  The association of the A.J. Clark chair with quantitative work on receptors has thus continued to the present day.
  The first of the nationwide Research Assessment Exercises took place in 1986. The UCL Department headed the list. It continued to be rated as the top Department of Pharmacology in each of the four research assessments that followed in 1989, 1992, 1996 and 2002.   But this performance was not enough to save the department.
caption: David Colquhoun
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