Professor Sir Rory Collins recognised in the 2025 Royal Society Awards
The Buchanan Medal is awarded by the Royal Society in recognition of distinguished contributions to the biomedical sciences. The award was created from a fund to the memory of the physician George Buchanan FRS, former Chief Medical Officer of the UK, and was first awarded in 1897.
The 2025 Buchanan Medal winner is Professor Sir Rory Collins, an epidemiologist who studies how to prevent and treat chronic disease in large population-based studies. Notable achievements from his career include coordinating the ISIS “mega-trials” which demonstrated that low-cost, widely accessible, clot-dissolving and clot-preventing treatments could halve the risk of death during a heart attack. He was also involved in conducting the 20,000 patient Heart Protection Study which showed that lowering LDL-cholesterol with statin therapy safely reduces the risk of death and disability from cardiovascular disease among a much wider range of people than thought likely to benefit. As a consequence, statin therapy is now used extensively worldwide.
Professor Collins became the Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of UK Biobank in 2005. Involving 500,000 participants from across the UK, it is the largest deeply-characterized prospective study of disease globally, readily accessible for any type of health research that is in the public interest. Over 20,000 researchers worldwide currently use it to better understand how to prevent and treat many different diseases, generating over 5000 scientific papers in 2024 alone.
In 2013, Professor Collins set up the Nuffield Department of Population Health, which he still leads today.
" I am delighted to receive the Buchanan Medal. This award recognises the importance of our cardiovascular clinical trials which have changed routine care worldwide and prevented many premature deaths. It also recognises the work of UK Biobank, a prospective study of 500,000 British men and women that enables scientists around the world to create better ways to diagnose, prevent and treat many different diseases. None of this would have been possible without the extraordinarily altruistic participants in our studies and the incredible teams who make exceptional science happen. " Professor Sir Rory Collins
Professor Collins is one of four University of Oxford researchers to be recognised at the 2025 Royal Society Awards. Professor Kayla King (Department of Biology), was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture; Professor Philipp Kukura (Department of Chemistry), was awarded the Clifford Paterson Medal and Lecture; and Professor Michael Wooldridge, Department of Computer Science, was awarded the Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture.