23 Facts About Peter McGuffin

Peter McGuffin was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 14 February 1949.

Peter McGuffin was the eldest of three children of Martha Melba and William Brown McGuffin, a merchant navy officer and Royal Naval reservist.

Peter McGuffin attended medical school at the University of Leeds, where he graduated in 1972 and then received postgraduate training in internal medicine.

Peter McGuffin completed his training as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, London and was awarded a Medical Research Council Fellowship to study genetics at the University of London and at Washington University in St Louis, where he spent a formative 18 months under the mentorship of 'Ted' Theodore Reich and Irving Gottesman.

Peter McGuffin completed a PhD with a thesis describing one of the first multi-marker genetic linkage studies in schizophrenia.

Peter McGuffin then became an MRC Senior Clinical Fellow at the Maudsley and the Institute of Psychiatry and then took up the Chair of Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff in 1987.

Peter McGuffin subsequently established the Cardiff department as one of the World's leading centres for psychiatric genetic research, and was among the early pioneers of multi-centre international collaborations in psychiatric genetics such as the European Science Foundation programme on the Molecular Neurobiology of Mental Illness.

Peter McGuffin moved back to London as successor to Prof Sir Michael Rutter as Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry in October 1998.

Peter McGuffin was elected a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998.

Peter McGuffin subsequently performed a meta-analysis of his and four other studies of HLA-schizophrenia association showing highly significant results.

Peter McGuffin went on to perform the first family linkage study of schizophrenia that used multiple classical markers and applied plausible parametric models as well as non-parametric analysis.

Long before it was technically achievable, Peter McGuffin was an advocate of aiming to scan the entire genome for genes involved in the common disorders such as schizophrenia, BPD and major depressive disorder, bearing in mind that they likely involved several, perhaps many, genes.

Peter McGuffin subsequently led genome wide searches including the GSK funded Depression Network sib pair linkage study across 7 European and US sites and the MRC-funded first GWAS of MDD.

In 1982 Peter McGuffin became the first psychiatrist to be awarded an MRC senior clinical fellowship.

Peter McGuffin followed up the Camberwell findings in a study in Cardiff that compared subjects with and without onset depression and their nearest age siblings.

Uher and Peter McGuffin have scrutinized the world data for a functional polymorphism in the promoter of the serotonin transporter gene and concluded that there is true effect, with positive replication depending on use of hard, objective environmental measurements.

Peter McGuffin met Anne Farmer at medical school in Leeds and they married on graduation in 1972.

Peter McGuffin subsequently became an academic psychiatrist and they published many papers together.

Peter McGuffin died on 30 January 2024, at the age of 74.

Peter McGuffin was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1988 and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1989 and became a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998.

Peter McGuffin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to biomedical research and psychiatric genetics.

Peter McGuffin served as the second president of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics.

Peter McGuffin published more than 500 papers and is one of the 3000 or so researchers who, according to Google Scholar, has an H index of more than 100.