National recognition for Institute of Dentistry’s Professor Alan Boyde

Dr Alan Boyde

He has been awarded the 2019 Anatomical Society Prize for his work on high class optical and electron microscopy of the hard tissues and their diseases.

As Professor of Mineralised Tissue Biology, Professor Boyde’s extensive range of current interests include:

• changes in bone with aging and in osteoporosis and osteoarthritis
• high density mineralised infill crack healing in calcified tissues
• high density mineralised protrusions in articular cartilage
• comparative micro-architecture of bone and responses to function and drugs
• overload arthrosis in man and racehorse
• studies of retrieved skeletal implants
• special problems in implant microscopy and
• characterisation of the phenotype in mouse genetic models.

Professor Boyde graduated BDS at The London Hospital Medical College in 1958 and joined the college’s anatomy department a year later as a junior demonstrator. He became Reader to Anatomy at University College London in 1967 before returning to his alma mater – now Queen Mary, in 2003.

In the 1960s his PhD earned him the Zoological Society’s Thomas Henry Huxley award.