Jonathan Ashmore

Early life and education Ashmore is the son of theatre director and actor Peter Ashmore and the actress Rosalie Crutchley.

Aged seven, Ashmore played Joe in the 1955 film A Kid for Two Farthings, adapted from the novel by Wolf Mankowitz.

Educated at Westminster School as a Queen's Scholar, Ashmore studied mathematics and physics at the University of Sussex followed by a PhD in theoretical physics in 1971 supervised by Tom Kibble at Imperial College London where his research investigated quantum field theory.

Career and research After a short postdoctoral research fellowship supervised by Abdus Salam between 1974 and 1977 in the Biophysics Department.

Ashmore was appointed a Lecturer in Physiology at the University of Bristol in 1983 and promoted to Reader in 1988, before moving back to UCL in 1993. especially the guinea pig (Cavia porcellus). This structure in the inner ear increases the selectivity and sensitivity of our hearing through an in-built cochlear amplifier.

In response to sound, outer hair cells lengthen then shorten through a process controlled and powered by the flow of electrically charged molecules such as potassium ions. This contraction propagates and amplifies sound, and he was the first to capture it on film during his Rock Around the Clock Hair Cell video.

His research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) and he has supervised several doctoral students to completion including Dan Jagger. He is also an elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB) and a trustee for the Hearing Research Trust. He served as president of The Physiological Society from 2012 to 2014.

Personal life Through his mother, Ashmore is descended from the 1st Earl of Leicester and his second wife, Lady Anne Amelia Keppel, a descendant of Charles II of England.