The William Stokes Award is awarded by the
Royal College of Physicians of Ireland to support and recognise the highest
standard of research by Specialist Registrars. Fergus was awarded the William
Stokes Award following a presentation of work from his PhD which was funded by
a clinical academic fellowship grant awarded by Molecular Medicine Ireland and
supervised by Professor Louise Kenny at the Anu Research Centre, Department of Obstetrics
and Gynaecology. This PhD was a collaboration between University College Cork and
the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Toronto.
Some of the results from this PhD have
recently been published in two separate publications in Hypertension, the
leading hypertension journal in the world. The topic of Fergus’s PhD was the
role of peroxisome proliferator activated receptor gammain the pathogenesis of
pre-eclampsia, a condition which causes high blood pressure and protein in the
urine in pregnancy and is responsible for the deaths of approximately 70,000
women worldwide every year. To date, no pharmacological intervention exists for
the treatment of pre-eclampsia. In his PhD, Fergus investigated the underlying
aetiology of pre-eclampsia and in addition, Fergus investigated a novel
therapeutic target for the treatment of pre-eclampsia.
William Stokes was an Irish physician, who
was Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Dublin. Educated in
medicine at the Meath Hospital in Dublin, he went on to create two important
works on cardiac and pulmonary diseases, A Treatise on the Diagnosis and
Treatment of Diseases of the Chest (1837), and The Diseases of the Heart and
Aorta (1854), as well as one of the first treatises on the use of the
stethoscope. He emphasised the importance of clinical examination in forming
diagnoses, and of ward-based learning for students of medicine.
Picture:
Dr Fergus McCarthy, winner of The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland
William Stokes Award for 2011 with Professor Louise Kenny
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