A dual citizen of both New Zealand and Canada (permanent resident in the UK), and a NZ-, UK- and Canadian-trained and accredited obstetrician (maternal-fetal medicine), Peter von Dadelszen is a Professor of Global Women’s Health at King’s College London, Honorary Consultant Obstetrician at King’s Health Partners (London, UK), and a Council member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. He is married to Laura Magee, Professor of Women’s Health at KCL, with whom he leads a women’s health research group. With over 40 years’ postgraduate clinical experience, his undergraduate and early postgraduate training were in New Zealand (BMedSc, MBChB, DipObst [Otago]), and he completed his general obstetrics and gynaecological training in UK, where he also undertook his doctoral training with Professor Chris Redman (and met Professor Magee) (DPhil [Oxon]).

Following maternal-fetal medicine, clinical pharmacology, and postdoctoral research training in Toronto (CertMFM, CertClinPharm [Toronto]), he was at the University of British Columbia and BC Women’s Hospital, Canada for 15 years (2000-15) and St George’s, University of London for two (2015-17). Increasingly over the past 15 years, Professor von Dadelszen’s research focus has been in less-developed countries. Initially, this was as the principal investigator of the PRE-EMPT (PRE-eclampsia & Eclampsia Monitoring, Prevention & Treatment) initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2010-19). In PRE-EMPT, he led research spanning qualitative assessment of barriers and facilitators of maternal health, health geography and economics, population health, outcome prediction, medical device development and testing, task-sharing, individual and cluster randomised controlled trials, at-scale implementation, global basic science collaboration, knowledge translation and advocacy.

PRE-EMPT involved collaboration with colleagues, NGOs, and governments in Africa (Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe), Asia (China, India, Pakistan), Oceania (Fiji), and Latin America (Argentina, Brazil), as well as engaging with the World Health Organization (WHO). More recently, as principal investigator, Professor von Dadelszen has initiated the UKRI-funded PRECISE (PREgnancy Care Integrating translational Science, Everywhere) Network (2017-22) that is building African research capacity through a project that is, in turn, deeply phenotyping ≈6,900 unselected pregnant women to understand pathways to resilient and complicated pregnancy outcomes in western (The Gambia), eastern (Kenya) and southern (Mozambique) Africa, and engages health geography colleagues in Zimbabwe. This phenotyping includes biomarkers, infectious and non-communicable disease burden, and social determinants of health. The receipt of Wellcome Trust funding of PRECISE-DYAD (2020-25) will achieve deep phenotyping follow-up of both mothers and their infants up to three years of age.

His most important publications have been the meta-regression analysis of the interaction between blood pressure control and fetal growth velocity (Lancet 2000), that led to Professor Magee’s CHIPS trial (NEJM 2015); the development of the fullPIERS (Lancet 2011), miniPIERS (PLoS Med 2014), and, most recently, PIERS-ML (Lancet Digit Health 2024) models; the observation that PlGF can discriminate between constitutional SGA and placental FGR (Placenta 2016); and the PRE-EMPT Calcium and Pre-eclampsia (Lancet 2019), oral antihypertensives for severe pregnancy hypertension (Lancet 2019), CLIP (Lancet 2020), and WILL (PLoS Med 2024) trials; and review of the origins, consequences, prevention, and management of pre-eclampsia (NEJM 2022). With Professor Magee, Professor von Dadelszen was co-recipient of the 2014 International Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy Chesley Award for their career contributions to pregnancy hypertension research and mentorship.

ORCID link: Peter von Dadelszen (0000-0003-4136-3070) - ORCID

Professor von Dadelszen is a course teacher on Women's Health iBSc, Global Health iBSc, Women's Health MSc, Global Health MSc/