Peter Hunter elected PSNZ President
PSNZ, Monday 17 December 2007
Professor Peter Hunter was elected President of the Physiological Society of New Zealand at its AGM held at MedSci 2007. Peter trained as an engineer and completed a DPhil in Physiology in 1975 at the University of Oxford. He took up a Lectureship in Engineering at the University of Auckland in 1978. Over the past thirty years, Peter has established himself as a leader in the rapidly developing field of computational physiology. His influential work on structure-based modelling of cardiac function has progressively been extended to other body systems including respiratory and musculo-skeletal systems.
Most recently Peter Hunter has led the international Physiome initatiative. The Physiome project seeks to establish a new approach to modelling physiological function across spatial scales that range from the molecule to organism. Web-accessible repositories of computer models, data and visualisation tools are being developed within a framework that facilitates multi-scale modelling. The objective is to make computer modelling an essential part of the tool kit for integrative physiology research and ensure that the benefits that this approach provides are as widely available as possible. This vision has been embraced by physiologists and bioengineers worldwide.
Peter received a personal Chair in Engineering Science in 1997. In 2001, he was appointed Director of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, which extended a longstanding research collaboration between Engineering Science and Physiology at Auckland. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford, where he leads activities in computational physiology. Peter fills a wide range of roles internationally and nationally and has received many honours, of which the following are a subset. He is chair of the IUPS Physiome Commission and was made a Distinguished Professor of the University of Auckland in 2001. Peter is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and was elected FRS in 2006.