Rate My Professor Gerard T. Wilkins

Professor Gerard T. Wilkins is a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago. A graduate of the Otago Medical School with an MB ChB in 1978, he completed specialist training in internal medicine and cardiology by 1984. Early in his career, he participated in the initial use of coronary angioplasty in New Zealand. In 1984, he received a National Heart Foundation overseas fellowship to serve as a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University in Boston, USA. Followed by an Australasian College of Physicians scholarship, he spent two additional years on staff at the same institutions, making significant contributions to echocardiography and Doppler imaging, including foundational work in patient selection and management for balloon valvuloplasty, infarct sizing in myocardial infarction, and prosthetic heart valve management. He was appointed to the staff of the University of Otago Medical School in 1988, advancing to Associate Professor before his promotion to Professor in 2022. Serving as a consultant cardiologist at Dunedin Hospital, he has maintained a pioneering interest in vascular intervention, introducing new techniques and participating in clinical trials, including renal denervation for resistant hypertension patients.

Professor Wilkins' research interests focus on interventional cardiology and clinical trials, with specializations in first-in-man interventional device trials and roles as regional principal investigator in multinational studies. In his March 2023 Inaugural Professorial Lecture at the University of Otago, titled "Giant steps is what you take: Advances in cardiovascular care over 40 years of research," he reflected on advancements in the field. He was awarded the Dean's Senior Staff Award for Quality in Teaching in 2016 for his contributions to medical education based on student feedback. Notable publications include "HIIT Improves Left Ventricular Exercise Response in Adults with Type 2 Diabetes" (Wilson et al., 2019), "The Type 2 Diabetic Heart: Its Role in Exercise Intolerance" (Baldi et al., 2016), "Carvedilol and metoprolol are both able to preserve cardioplegic arrest contractility" (Bussey et al., 2020), and "The carbon monoxide prodrug oCOm-21 increases Ca2+ sensitivity of the cardiac myofilament" (Payne et al., 2024). His scholarly output includes 147 publications with over 5,000 citations, impacting areas such as cardiac function in diabetes, exercise responses, and cardiovascular interventions.