Professor Mark Hanson is British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Science within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton.

Professor Mark Hanson is one of the UK’s leading researchers on developmental pathways to disease. He is ex-President of the International Society for the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease and was a founder member and former secretary of the Society. He has served on a range of committees in government, charitable and NGOs focusing on the importance of adopting lifecourse perspective to new ways of reducing the burden of non-communicable disease globally. In the UK he directs the University of Southampton Institute of Developmental Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine and overseas he holds visiting appointments in Auckland, Singapore, and Jamaica. 

Mark has published more than 250 original papers, 129 reviews and 14 books. His research concerns several aspects of development and health, ranging from how the environment before and after birth affects the risk of chronic disease – such as cardiovascular and chronic lung disease, diabetes and obesity – to population studies aimed at the early identification of risk, so that timely preventative interventions can be made. The group are exploring the epigenetic processes which relate to such risks, and which may serve as valuable early life biomarkers. His Institute works on these problems in both developed and developing countries in many parts of the world. Mark is particularly interested in the links between medical science and society and was a founder member of the Wellcome Trust’s Sci-Art panel. He is much involved in educational projects to promote health literacy in school students – LifeLab – in the public understanding of science and how evolutionary thinking applies to human biology and medicine. His recent popular science books include Mismatch – the lifestyle diseases timebomb (2006) which is translated into Mandarin, Portuguese and German, Principles of Evolutionary Medicine 2nd Edn 2015 and Fat, Fate & Disease (2012), all published by OUP.

See profile in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology