Paul Dark

Overview

Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Honorary NHS Consultant

Biography

I originally studied undergraduate physics and then medicine. Graduating from The Manchester Medical School 1989, I went on to study clinical academic surgery, emergency medicine and critical care at the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester in the UK, and at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. I returned to Manchester in 1998 as MRC Clinical Training Fellow, completing my PhD supervised by Professor Rod Little at the MRC Trauma Unit in 2002, where I developed non-invasive methods to transduce and study dynamic cardio-respiratory responses to tissue injury and haemorrhage. I was appointed to my current clinical academic post at the University of Manchester in 2003, carrying out clinical duties in Intensive Care Medicine as Honorary NHS Consultant at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust. Over the last few years I have provided leadership of a programme of work funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) developing and assessing the diagnostic utility of emerging molecular technologies in the setting of sterile tissue injury and severe infection - focused on matrices in blood and breath. Funded by Innovate UK (formerly Technology Strategy Board) I have led a programme of work developing novel technologies aimed at rapid point-of-care infection/sepsis diagnosis.

In addition to NHS/NIHR R&D leadership roles regionally and nationally, I hold senior academic leadership positions in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health focused on developing postgraduate learning in research and innovation in acute healthcare.