European Young Investigator of the Year  

Hull York Medical School (HYMS) postgraduate student Dr Priyad Ariyaratnam has won the prestigious European Young Investigator of the Year award in cardiothoracics for the preliminary results of his MD.

Priyad, who is a cardiothoracic registrar and research fellow at Castle Hill Hospital, is currently doing his MD with HYMS looking at the mechanisms of pulmonary hypertension using isolated human pulmonary arteries from lung cancer patients.

"I wanted to do this project as pulmonary hypertension carries a high morbidity and mortality rate following cardiac surgery and in children born with congenital heart defects," he said. "There has been a lot of work on animal models but we are still a long way from knowing how to manage this problem. Our research is looking directly at human models of the disease."

He was given his award at the European Association of Cardiothoracic Surgeons (EACTS) in Barcelona. The prize has not been won by an investigator from England since 2005.

EACTS, the official society for all of Europe's cardiac and thoracic surgical institution, holds an annual scientific meeting where leaders in the field from America, Asia and Europe come to talk about the latest advances in Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery.