Jules Griffin's Biography

Jules Griffin, Director, Metabolic Profiling Forum University of Cambridge

Jules Griffin was appointed Head of Lipid Profiling and Signalling in March 2011. This is a joint appointment with the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry. He is also an Honorary Professor at Imperial College London and is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

The work of Jules’ group focusses on the use of high resolution mass spectrometry to measure lipids in biofluids and tissue extracts in order to better understand the causes and consequences of type 2 diabetes and obesity (collectively referred to sometimes as the Metabolic Syndrome). In particular this work focusses on four areas of research: (i) understanding the role that peroxisome proliferator activated receptors (PPARs) play in regulating metabolism across the body, (ii) understanding how lipids influence the function of the cell and hence why changes in lipid intake affect how the body functions, (iii) examining how lipids influence tissue inflammation in the Metabolic syndrome and (iv) developing computer software tools for storing and processing the large quantity of data produced by these experiments. Jules is a committee member of the Metabolomics Society and a founding director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum. He studied at the University of Oxford and was awarded a 1st Class degree in Chemistry and then a D.Phil. in Biochemistry, under the supervision of Profs George Radda and Caroline Rae (1994-7) and prior to his move to Cambridge, he held posts at Harvard Medical School (1997-9) and Imperial College London (1999-2003), and was a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Imperial College London (2000-3) and the University of Cambridge (2003-8).