Mark McCarthy

Robert Turner Professor of Diabetes
Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism

Mark McCarthy is Robert Turner Professor of Diabetes at Oxford University, based at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM) and at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. His work on the genetics and genomic basis of type 2 diabetes seeks to define the relationship between genetic variation, environment, intermediate phenotypes, and clinical disease, in the belief that such information will translate into a significant impact on clinical care for people with diabetes, through more rational and effective deployment of available preventative and therapeutic modalities.

He obtained his medical degree at the University of Cambridge and postgraduate clinical training in general medicine, diabetes and endocrinology at the London Hospital. Following research training with – amongst others – Newton Morton and Eric Lander, he took up an appointment as Senior Lecturer (subsequently Professor in Genomic Medicine) at Imperial College in 1995, moving to Oxford as the Robert Turner Professor of Diabetes in 2002. In the past decade, his group has become established as one of the leading international teams working on the genetics of T2D, with expertise extending from physiological characterisation through to high-throughput genomic analysis and related issues in computational biology. Prof McCarthy currently leads the T2D component of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, and has been intimately involved in many of the recent discoveries generated by the application of genome wide association approaches to diabetes, obesity and related traits. His group is increasingly involved in efforts to understand how such information can be translated into advances in clinical management, and in extending these studies beyond the European context. He has a strong commitment to the wider research community, having served as a member and chair of the Diabetes UK Research Committee, and on Wellcome and MRC panels. He serves on the Editorial Board of Diabetes, Diabetologia, PLoS Medicine, Human Molecular Genetics and several other journals.