Professor Garret Adare FitzGerald is a leading research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) who was awarded the 2005 RDS Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence for his pioneering work which led the way in our understanding of how heart attack risk could be reduced through the administration of low-dose aspirin.
He was heavily involved in the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of one of the biggest selling arthritis pain relieving drugs, Vioxx. He predicted and then proved that Vioxx and similar drugs, including Celebrex, blocked the effects of low-dose aspirin, leaving patients at possible increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
Born in Dublin, he was educated in Belvedere College and went on to study medicine at UCD. Following work at St Vincent's and the Mater hospitals, he took a postgraduate course in clinical pharmacology in London. Prior to moving to UPenn, he held senior positions at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee before returning for a time to Dublin, where he was Professor and Chairman in the Department of Medicine and Experimental Therapeutics at UCD.
He currently holds a number of senior positions at UPenn including Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Director of the University's Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics. He is also a Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University and Associate Dean for Translational Research.
