Congratulations to Professor Bryan Williams and his team whose groundbreaking blood pressure device took top honours in the ‘Innovation and Technology’ category at last night’s Times Higher Education Awards.

The THE Awards are the Oscars of the higher education sector, prestigious awards honouring the very best of the best. Professor Williams, from our Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, led the team which developed a non-invasive device for measuring aortic blood pressure.

You can read the details in this previous Newsblog story but, in short: brachial blood pressure is easy to measure but can be misleading; aortic blood pressure is much more accurate and useful but can’t be measured without surgery. The Leicester device, which looks like a wristwatch and was developed with Singapore-based HealthSTATS International, allows doctors to accurately calculate aortic BP by measuring brachial BP.

This is a magnificent achievement: out of all the many technical breakthroughs developed in British universities in the past year, the Leicester blood pressure device has been judged the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Innovation and Technology’.

The Judges said that the new device has "transformed the measurement and monitoring of blood pressure" and "will have significant and immediate health benefits and the potential for considerable commercial success."

The University of Leicester was runner-up in two other categories at last night’s awards. Professor Nisha Dogra from our Greenwood Institute of Child Health was nominated for Most Innovative Teacher of the Year and the Department of Geology’s research into how primitive fish decompose was up for Research Project of the Year. In addition, we are a partner in the multi-institution Realising Opportunities Partnership which won Widening Participation Initiative of the Year (submitted by the University of Newcastle, who host the Realising Opportunities administration).

Awards photo credit: Charles Fox