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“When I registered for my PhD in the late 1970’s, hypertension was an emerging field of research. My PhD supervisor and mentor Sir George Alleyne was also very interested in this area. These two factors influenced my choice of research focus. Now through the UWI Tropical Medical Research Institute (TMRI), research is being done in areas relevant to the major health problems of the region, especially when they coincide with international priorities. We have received funds from grant-giving agencies such as The Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health, the European Commission, Nestle Nutrition Foundation, the Medical Research Council, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID, the Ford Foundation, Pan American Health Organization, Carnegie Corporation, the US Department of Agriculture, and the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Professor Terrence Forrester

PROFESSOR OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE AND DIRECTOR
TROPICAL MEDICINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE
FACULTY OF MEDICAL SCIENCES
MONA CAMPUS, JAMAICA
Tel: (876) 927-1884 • Email: Terrence.Forrester@uwimona.edu.jm

PROFILE

In 2006, Professor Terrence Forrester was the recipient of the prestigious Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence (ANSCAFE), one of the region’s leading recognition programmes, for his work. That same year the inaugural Caribbean Laureate also earned the Boehrigher Ingleheim Award for Hypertension Research in Developing Countries. Three years prior, he was also the winner of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research at UWI. Professor Forrester (BSc, MSc, PhD, DM) unified four research units across three UWI campuses when he spearheaded the formation of the Tropical Medical Research Institute, which merged the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit, the Sickle Cell Research Unit and the Epidemiology Research Unit at UWI Mona, and the Chronic Disease Research Unit in Barbados. Forrester, who has served as an adviser to a number of international health organizations, including the World Health Organization, the Medical Research Council (UK) and the United States Center for Disease Control, has focused in his research on the causes of hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. This work has been especially significant in the Caribbean context, given the region’s prevalence of hypertension and high death rate from coronary heart disease.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Professor Forrester’s interest has been man’s biological adaptation. In particular he has been pursuing discovery research to understand how man adapts to nutritional stress and the costs and consequences of such adaptation to the risk of obesity, hypertension and insulin resistance. Since 1999, Professor Forrester has received at least 14 research grants from various funding agencies to assist with his work to better understand the underlying basis of hypertension and insulin resistance. The three areas of work with which he has been involved are intermediary metabolism in children with severe malnutrition, hypertension research, and research into the developmental origins of health and disease. He and his team have proposed a unifying hypothesis linking early nutritional experience with later risk of obesity and attendant diseases, hypertension and diabetes which we are in process now of elucidating with novel experimental approaches focusing on metabolism, physiology and epigenetics.