Professor Ruth Murphy is a Consultant Dermatologist at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham, United Kingdom, and has a keen interest in chronic inflammatory diseases in adults and children. She graduated from Sheffield Medical School in 1990 after completing a first-class intercalated degree in dermatopathology. Following membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1993, her first post in dermatology was as a registrar at Waikato University Hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand. She returned to the United Kingdom in January 1994, having won a clinical research fellowship with the Wellcome Trust which enabled her to carry out a PhD in genetic linkage analysis around the IL-4 cluster in atopic and parasitised populations. She began as a dermatology registrar in January 1998 and completed her specialist training in July 2001. Her first consultant post was at Chesterfield Royal Hospital, United Kingdom in 2001, and while there she went to Charlotte, North Carolina, United States to do further training in genital dermatology.