Team

PhD, Principal Investigator - Faculty of Medicine

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Mitochondrial Medicine

Academy of Finland Research Fellow

E-mail: thomas.mcwilliams [at] helsinki.fi

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9570-4152

Tom has an eclectic research background. He graduated with a 1st Class Honours degree in Biochemistry from the National University of Ireland, Galway (ranked 1st in Class). Subsequently, he undertook doctoral research on the Wellcome Trust Four-Year PhD Programme in Integrative Neuroscience at Cardiff University, UK. He completed his PhD studies in developmental neurobiology under the guidance of Prof. Alun M. Davies FMedSci FRS, co-supervised by Prof. Stephen B. Dunnett FMedSci. Following a short post-doctoral period in the Davies Lab, Tom was recruited by Dario R. Alessi FMedSci FRS to the MRC Protein Phosphorylation & Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Here, he worked with Ian Ganley, PhD and Miratul M. K. Muqit FRCP on selective autophagy and mitochondrial signalling in vivo, with a principal focus on Parkinson's disease. His unexpected discoveries in both mitophagy and degeneration signalling sparked a drive to unravel their mechanistic interplay in mammalian development and disease.

Tom launched his independent laboratory in 2018 at the University of Helsinki. He is a Principal Investigator at the Faculty of Medicine, and a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Mitochondrial Medicine. The McWilliams laboratory is adjunct member of FinMIT: an established Centre of Excellence for Finnish metabolism and mitochondrial research. In 2018, he was named Academy of Finland Research Fellow and awarded the prestigious Novo Nordisk Foundation Excellence Project in Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Senior Researcher (2018-Present)