Chair and Director of Cardiff University’s School of Biosciences and Medical Research Council (MRC) Professor, leading an MRC-supported research group working on Ca2+ signaling at the Cardiff School of Biosciences.

Pioneered single channel current recording in epithelial cells, characterizing Ca2+-activated ion channels (ISI Citation Classic: Petersen & Maruyama Nature 1984).  Discovered physiological local Ca2+ signalling events in epithelial cells (Thorn et al Cell 1993), messenger-mediated Ca2+ release from the nuclear envelope (Gerasimenko et al Cell 1995) and intracellular Ca2+ tunnels (Mogami et al Cell 1997). Recently demonstrated the crucial role of IP3 receptors in the initiation of alcohol-related pancreatitis (Gerasimenko et al PNAS 2009). Received Nordic Insulin Foundation’s Jacobaeus Prize (1994) and Czech Academy of Sciences’ Purkynĕ Medal (2003). Foreign Member of Royal Danish Academy of Sciences & Letters (1988), Founding Member of Academia Europaea (1988), Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) (1998), Fellow of The Royal Society (FRS) (2000), Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP) (2001) and Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2004). Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (ML) (2010).  Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for ‘Services to Science’ (2008). 

Recently appointed Chair of the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) Biological Sciences Panel in the new Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014). Chair of the European Research Council’s (ERC) Starting Grant Panel for Physiology, Pathophysiology and Endocrinology (2009 - ). Member of The Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Awards Committee (2008 - ). Former Vice-President of The Royal Society (2005-2006) and in this period Chair of the Royal Society’s Working Group responding to the UK Government’s plan for a new type of national research assessment. Chair of Academia Europaea’s Nominations Committee (2004 - ), with overall responsibility for the competitive annual elections to membership, and also Member of the Academy’s Executive Board and Council.

Since 2003, Chair of the European Editorial Committee (European Executive Editor) of the American Physiological Society’s flagship journal Physiological Reviews, with responsibility for the European component (~50%) of the journal’s output (Physiological Reviews currently has an Impact Factor [IF] of 37.726 and is ranked as no. 6 of ALL scientific journals with respect to IF).