27. Deirdre Kelly, Birmingham Children's Hospital

Deirdre Kelly, director of the liver unit at Birmingham Children's Hospital, was born and brought up in Calcutta, India, while her father was working for Lipton's Tea.

She spent her early childhood in India and went to boarding school in Dublin when she was 12 years old.

She first decided to become a doctor at the age of eight and despite much opposition from family and nuns at her convent school, persisted and went to Trinity College Dublin to study medicine in 1967.

She is now director of the liver unit at Birmingham Children's Hospital, which she set up in 1989 to provide a national service for children with liver disease.

She had the idea for the liver unit while working as an assistant professor in pediatric gastroenterology at the university of Nebraska in Omaha, USA, where she had to care for children undergoing liver transplants
The unit turned into a huge success successful and is one of the busiest paediatric liver transplant programmes, with survival rates of more than 90 per cent. She now has three other consultant colleagues and a team of junior doctors, research fellows, specialist nurses and other valuable members.

The unit received national praise, but came in for criticism in 2001 when it emerged organs had been removed from dead children without the parents' knowledge.

Prof Kelly, who is nationally and internationally renowned for her work, was named Hospital Doctor of the Year in 1991 and Midland Woman of Achievement in 1996.