Obituary, Donald Singer
(largely inspired by the obituary published by his daughter Emma Thompson in The Guardian, 29 Jul 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jul/29/donald-singer-obituary)
Our dear colleague and friend Donald Singer died aged 67 of a cardiac arrest in July 2022.
Donald was born in Forres, North-East of Inverness, Scotland. He did his medical training at the University of Aberdeen, and completed his postgraduate medical training at Hammersmith, Charing Cross and St George’s hospitals. As from 1989, he was a research fellow at St George’s Hospital Medical School, before becoming a senior lecturer and reader in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics. In 2003 he moved to the University of Warwick as its founding professor of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics, and while there was also co-director of the European Society of Hypertension Centre of Excellence until his retirement at the end of 2013.
Donald was active in many medical societies and committees, including the British and Irish Hypertension Society, and of course the EACPT. He was Secretary of our association between 2011 and 2015, co-opted member of the Executive Committee from 2015 to 2019 and EACPT representative at the EMA HealthCare Professionals’ Working Party (HCPWP) until his death. Over many years, he also very efficiently manned the association website and its broader communication through social media.
His interests were in looking at new approaches to personalising medicine; in chemical and genomic research for the discovery of medicines and their harmful effects; the prevention and treatment of hypertension and other cardiovascular disorders; and in public understanding of health.
In 2009 he co-founded, with the poet Michael Hulse, the Hippocrates prize for poetry and medicine, which became an annual international competition.
After retiring, Donald worked in Rwanda as a member of the faculty of Yale School of Medicine and contributed to a number of medical journals.
He had a remarkable breadth of knowledge of the arts and sciences, and a huge range of hobbies, enjoying birdwatching, playing the violin, golf, bridge and tennis, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into each one.
He was unfailingly kind, helpful, polite, and discreet at all times. We will miss him a lot and present our sincere condolences to his family, friends and close colleagues.
EACPT Executive Committee, on behalf of all members