Research Advisory Board - Stephen Gough, PhD MD FRCP

Professor of Medicine and Hon. Consultant Physician, University of Birmingham and University of Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.

Stephen Gough (Chairman), graduated from Leeds University Medical School in 1983 and after a series of junior posts in the Northern Region returned to Leeds to work towards his MD which focused on, cardiac muscle dysfunction and impaired fibrinolysis in patients with type 2 diabetes. This led to a 12-month laboratory sabbatical in Marseille, France, and further research into factors regulating the fibrinolytic system.

Stephen returned to Oxford to take up the post of MRC lecturer where he developed interests in the genetics of type 1 diabetes, which included the first genome wide linkage study in complex disease. His interests in the genetic susceptibility to the autoimmune disease process developed on moving to Birmingham where over the last 8 years he has used autoimmune thyroid disease as a model for the identification of general autoimmune disease genes.

Stephen has advanced our understanding of the role of the HLA and CTLA4 gene regions in the auitoimmune disease process and recently confirmed the role of the LYP gene region as a general autoimmunity susceptibility locus. He is currently the principle investigator of the Wellcome Trust funded national collection of DNA from index cases and families with autoimmune thyroid disease and is currently Professor of Medicine at the University of Birmingham.