Professor Andy Trafford
Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
Professor Andy Trafford graduated in Veterinary Science from Liverpool in 1991. After a short period in private practice he returned to Liverpool to complete his PhD in cardiac physiology and gain Royal College certification in Veterinary Anaesthesia. His PhD and initial post-doctoral work focused on the control of intracellular calcium levels in cardiac muscle cells and how excessive amounts of calcium stored inside cardiac cells leads to heart rhythm disturbances.
Andy moved to Manchester in 1999 as a lecturer and was promoted to Professor of Cardiac Pathophysiology in 2011. In 2008 he received The Wellcome Prize from The Physiological Society and in 2012 obtained a British Heart Foundation Senior Research Fellowship.
Andy’s research interests remain in elucidating how perturbations in ion regulation alterations in the heart lead to cardiac diseases such as heart failure and arrhythmias. More recently his work has also incorporated advanced imaging techniques including super resolution microscopy methods to determine how the nanoscale organisation of ion channels and proteins influences ion regulation in the heart and thus drive cardiac dysfunction in disease. Using these fundamental approaches, he has identified that Viagra and drugs that target the same intracellular signalling cascade as Viagra, have very strong cardioprotective effects in diseases such as heart failure and a wide variety of cardiac arrhythmia syndromes.
His work is funded by several grants from The British Heart Foundation, UKRI (MRC, BBSRC, NERC) and National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs).