Una Martin facts for kids

Una Martin is a very smart scientist who used to be a professor of clinical pharmacology. She also helped make things fair for everyone at the University of Birmingham. She knows a lot about hypertension, which is high blood pressure, and how to check it outside of a hospital. She is also a member of the British Pharmacological Society.

Una Martin's Early Life and Education

Una Martin grew up in Ireland. Her parents were both dentists. She went to Trinity College Dublin to study medicine and finished in 1983. While she was there, she also studied pharmacology, which is about how medicines work.

After medical school, she trained to be a heart doctor, called a cardiologist, in Dublin. Then, she moved to Edinburgh to get her PhD, which is a very high degree for scientists, from the University of Edinburgh.

Una Martin's Research and Career

Una Martin started her career at the University of Southampton. She was a lecturer, which is like a teacher, in clinical pharmacology. She studied things like allergic rhinitis, which is like hay fever, and how to use breathing tests to find out if someone had asthma.

In 1996, she became a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham. She found out that people with hypertension (high blood pressure) sometimes felt less pain than people with normal blood pressure. She wondered if this meant their memory might also be affected. Even though high blood pressure can affect thinking, her research showed that people with high blood pressure had similar reaction times to others.

She also showed that checking blood pressure outside of a clinic, like at home, is a good way to find out about heart problems. It's also a smart way to save money.

Helping People with High Blood Pressure

Una Martin leads the team that helps people with hypertension at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. She believes that people with slightly high blood pressure should try healthy habits first, like eating well and exercising, before taking medicine.

She helped create important guidelines for treating high blood pressure for the NICE organization. She also looked at how a person's background can affect their blood pressure. She studied how hard it can be to treat high blood pressure in older people because they often take many medicines. She also looked at how to safely treat young women who might have babies.

Since more and more people in the UK are getting older, Una Martin has also studied how to help older patients use fewer medicines when possible. She has worked on many studies to see how well different blood pressure medicines work. She also looked at how to treat very stubborn high blood pressure that is hard to control.

Teaching and Helping Students

Una Martin helped create a test called the Prescribers’ Licence. This test helps make sure that new doctors know how to give out medicines safely. It later became the National Prescribing Assessment.

In 2009, she started a special scholarship at University College Dublin. It's called the Dr Nicholas and Mrs Maura Martin Scholarship, named after her parents. It gives €2000 to medical students to help them with their studies. She also studied how to use charts to keep track of important health numbers for conditions like high blood pressure, asthma, and diabetes.

In 2014, Una Martin became a director at the Wellcome Trust Research Facility at the University of Birmingham. Then, in 2015, she became a full professor. In 2017, she was chosen to be on the team that helps decide what articles get published in the British Journal of Cardiology.

Working for Fairness and Equality

Una Martin cares a lot about making things fair for everyone at the University of Birmingham. Since 2007, she has led a group called Women in Academic Medicine. This group helps women who work in medical science.

In 2014, she helped the University of Birmingham Medical School get a special award called the silver Athena SWAN award. This award recognizes efforts to support women in science. In 2015, she became the deputy pro-vice-chancellor for equalities, which means she was in charge of making sure everyone was treated fairly. She is also working on a project to help the University of Birmingham get an award for race equality.