Appointments

Professor Aiden Day
Chair of English Literature
Aidan Day was born in London and took his MA and PhD at the University of Leicester. He was Professor of Nineteenth Century and Contemporary Literature at the University of Edinburgh before taking up, in 2001, a Professorship in British Literature and Culture at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His research specialisms are in Nineteenth Century and post-1945 Literatures in English.

His books include Romanticism (1996), Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (1998), and Tennyson's Scepticism (2005). He is joint editor of a 31 volume annotated facsimile edition of Tennyson's poetical manuscripts, The Tennyson Archive (1987-93). In 1988 he published Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, the first book-length academic study concentrating solely on the words to Dylan's song-poems.

Professor Vicki Entwistle
Chair of Values in Health Care
Vikki Entwistle has been promoted to a Personal Chair of Values in Health Care. Vikki joined the University in 2005 as a Reader within the Social Dimensions of Health Institute. She was previously at the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination in York and the Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen. Vikki spent 2003-04 as a Harkness Fellow in Health Policy at Harvard School of Public Health.

Vikki's current research includes investigations of: the values attached to choice in health care; the implications of policies and patient-level interventions that aim to promote choice of treatment and choice of health care provider; and the responsibilities that might be allocated to patients in the context of efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Vikki is also developing projects that will examine the tensions between standardisation and individualisation in health care quality improvement initiatives.

Professor CS Lau
Chair of Medicine
Chak Lau graduated MBChB (Dundee) in 1985. In 1993, he was awarded MD with Honours by the University of Dundee for his research work on Raynaud's phenomenon. Chak joined the University of Hong Kong as Lecturer in Medicine/Rheumatology in 1992 and was successfully promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1997 and Professor in 2000. Since May 2001, he has been an Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

Chak was Visiting Professor of the UCLA Division of Rheumatology in 1995, and has been a Visiting Professor of the First Military Hospital, Guangzhou, China since 1998, and the Foshan First People's Hospital, Foshan, China, since 2005. Currently, he is the President of the Asia Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology. Chak's research interest focuses on immunology and clinical outcome of systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Professor Tracy Palmer
Personal Chair of Molecular Microbiology
Tracy Palmer was born in Sheffield in 1967. She obtained a BSc in Biochemistry (1988) and subsequently a PhD, also in Biochemistry (1992) from the University of Birmingham. After a postdoc at the University of Dundee she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to set up her own research group at the John Innes Centre in Norwich.

Research in Tracy's lab led to the description of a new protein export system in bacteria, a discovery for which she received the Fleming Medal from the Society for General Microbiology in 2002. In 2004 she was awarded a prestigious MRC Senior Non Clinical Research Fellowship and she was promoted to Professor of Molecular Microbiology in 2005.

Tracy's research focuses on the export of proteins in bacteria. One of the new projects she will develop in Dundee is an investigation of the role of exported proteins in virulence of the potato pathogenic bacterium Streptomyces scabies, a collaboration with colleagues at SCRI.

Professor Frank Sargent
Personal Chair of Molecular Microbiology
Frank Sargent was born in 1970 in Kirkcaldy. Having completed a BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Edinburgh in 1992 and a PhD at the University of Dundee in 1996, Frank relocated to Norwich and spells as a postdoctoral researcher at the John Innes Centre (1996-1998) and the University of East Anglia (1998-2000) followed.

In October 2000 Frank set up his own research group at UEA having won a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Frank's research involves the molecular biology of bacteria with a focus on protein secretion systems. The excellence of this work was recognized by the award of the Fleming Prize from The Society for General Microbiology (2006) and the Colworth Medal from The Biochemical Society (2007).

Professor Perry Wilson
Chair in History
Perry Willson BSc (Hons), PhD, FRHistS, has taught Italian history at Edinburgh University since 1990, before which she was Lecturer in British and European History at Leicester Polytechnic for four years.

Her publications include The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy, OUP, 1993; Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: the Massaie Rurali, Routledge, 2002; Gender, Family and Sexuality: the Private Sphere in Italy 1860-1945, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 and numerous articles, mainly on modern Italian gender history.

She is currently completing a book on Women in Twentieth Century Italy for Palgrave Macmillan. She has held Fellowships at the Einaudi Foundation (Turin), the European University Institute (Florence) and Nuffield College (Oxford). She is Chair of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy and Vice-convener of Women's History Scotland.