Professor Dame Anna Dominiczak

I am a Clinician Scientist – a Scientist and a Doctor. As a third-year medical student in Gdansk, I decided that I wanted to practise medicine but also to bring something new to medicine and therefore learn how to be a scientist and a clinician at the same time. It’s an important combination as I believe it can really help and change mankind. This is hugely important because at the end of the day, helping people is what doctors and scientists do and if we combine the two together we can be even more effective.

My area of expertise is precision medicine. It uses electronic health data combined with digital radiology, digital pathology, next-generation sequencing of our genomes as well as other molecular methods to characterise patients; and this is changing the way we diagnose, treat and prevent diseases – particularly chronic diseases and will ultimately save money for the NHS in Scotland.

Scotland is considered an area of excellence in precision medicine and is at the centre of biomedical scientific innovation. Our links with the Medical Research Council and Innovate UK are helping to bring the best of innovation to the national and international stage. Scotland has an enormous chance to be the best in the world in precision medicine and I look forward to the day when this approach is simply regarded as ‘medicine’.

Anna is holding a stethoscope which is an acoustic medical device used to listen to lung and heart sounds. Medical students and young doctors wear their stethoscopes around their necks with pride.