Dr Derek Connolly speaks to Adam Price-Evans, Commissioning Editor of Future Cardiology: Derek Leslie Connolly is a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at Birmingham City Hospital (UK). He qualified from the University of Edinburgh (UK) summa cum laude in Pharmacology in 1985 and in Medicine in 1988 where he was the Brunton Medalist. As a Carnegie scholar at the University of California, San Diego (CA, USA) he saw the early promise of angioplasty and changed his career plan from cardiac surgery to coronary intervention. He then spent a decade training in Cardiology in Cambridge (UK) where he held a British Heart Foundation PhD Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. His main clinical and research interest is the detection and treatment of atherosclerosis. He was appointed to his current role in 2000 and has been integral to the early development of both primary angioplasty and cardiac CT programs. He was UK Chief Investigator for the FOURIER trial.