Prof. Peter
McNaughton

Peter McNaughton was born in New Zealand, where he studied Physics at the University of Auckland. He was lecturer in Physiology at the University of Cambridge from 1978 to 1991, and moved to London in 1991 as Head of Physiology at King’s College London. In 1999 he moved to Cambridge as Head of the Department of Pharmacology and in 2013 returned to King’s College London as Professor of Pharmacology.

He has worked in several areas of neuroscience, mainly in the cellular basis of sensations – vision, pain and magnetic sensation. The principal interests of his lab at present are the molecular and cellular bases of pain, thermal sensation and thermo-regulation. His work connects pain and thermal sensation at the level of molecular detectors to the behaviour of the whole animal. He has initiated two drug development projects, both arising from discoveries in his lab.