Appointments

Professor Colin N.A. Palmer
Chair of Pharmacogenomics
College of Medicine
Professor Palmer obtained a BSc in Genetics from Glasgow University in 1985 and a PhD in Molecular Toxicology in 1991.

He worked as an American Heart Association postdoctoral fellow with Prof Eric Johnson at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California from 1991 to 1995, and joined the laboratory of Professor Roland Wolf at the Biomedical Research Centre in Ninewells Hospital in 1995.

In 1998, Professor Palmer established his own laboratory at the Biomedical Research Centre, as a Principal Investigator and lecturer primarily studying proteins that sense dietary fat in order to develop new drugs for the management of cardiovascular disease.

His lab also specializes in population genetic research and has research projects studying the genetic basis for susceptibility to common diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, asthma and cancer. This will provide new drug targets for the prevention and treatment of such diseases and will also allow for more informed and personalised usage of current therapies

He participates as a member of the scientific committee of the Generation Scotland programme (www.generationscotland.org), and is a primary investigator of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (www.wtccc.org.uk).

Professor Stephen McKenna
Chair of Computer Vision
College of Art, Science and Engineering
Professor McKenna graduated in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1990 and was awarded a PhD in 1994 by the University of Dundee for a thesis on automated cytological image analysis.

Following an EU research fellowship in Italy, he worked for three years as an EPSRC postdoctoral researcher with Dr S Gong at Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London. Much of this work was published in their monograph 'Dynamic Vision'.

He was a visiting researcher at BT Advanced Perception Lab, UK and then at George Mason University in Prof H Wechsler's lab. In 1998 he took a lectureship at the University of Dundee and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004. He was British Association Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecturer in 2001 and currently teaches computer vision and machine learning at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels.

Professor McKenna's research focuses on the development of modelling, learning and inference methods for computer vision and their application in areas such as content-based image browsing, human-computer interaction, and biomedical image analysis.

Funders of his research in Dundee have included EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, the Technology Strategy Board, Scottish Enterprise, the Breast Cancer Research Trust, and the Nuffield Foundation. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and serves as associate editor for two international journals.