Professor Colin Leslie Gibbs

BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD (Sydney)

Honorary Professor - Department of Physiology

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After completing his PhD in cardiac electrophysiology, Prof. Colin Gibbs became interested in cardiac energetics and cardiac mechanics and worked at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) with Prof. Wilfred Mommaerts and Mr. Nick Ricchiuti. Mr. Ricchiuti had pioneered a new method of making thermopiles to measure heat production. This methodology was adapted by Prof. Gibbs so it could be used with cardiac preparations (papillary muscles) and the first records of cardiac heat production were produced in 1965.

Prof. Gibbs has maintained his interest in muscle energetics and was the first scientist to publish mammalian heat production data for cardiac tissue in 1965, for skeletal muscle in 1971 and for smooth muscle in 1974. Over the last thirty years, Prof. Gibbs has been an invited speaker at twenty international meetings. He has authored a chapter in the American Physiological Society, Handbook of Physiology and has written several key review articles on cardiac energetics.

Together with his colleagues Drs. Brian Chapman, Igor Wendt, George Kotsanas and Chris Barclay, Prof. Gibbs has remained interested in the energetics of all three types of muscle. The main aim of Prof. Gibb's cardiac research had been to establish a reliable energy balance sheet that identifies the cost of the various physiological and biochemical processes that underlie contractions. Both pure and applied problems have been examined with a particular interest in the energetics of cardiac hypertrophy. Hypertrophy has been induced by pressure and volume overloading rat and rabbit hearts and by the use of drugs. In recent years, Drs. Wendt and Kotsanas have expanded the muscle group's interests to include calcium imaging using the fura technique. Dr. Barclay, the most recent group member, is working with skeletal muscle investigating the energetics of fatigue in fast- and slow-skeletal muscles