Colin Dayan

Biography

Professor of Clinical Diabetes and Metabolism, Cardiff University School of Medicine. Colin Dayan trained in medicine at University College, Oxford, and Guy’s and Charing Cross Hospitals in London, UK before obtaining a PhD in the immunology of Graves’ Disease in Laboratory of Marc Feldmann. He then spent a year as an endocrine fellow at the Massachussetts General Hospital in Boston, USA before completing his specialist training in diabetes and endocrinology as a Lecturer in Bristol. He became a consultant senior lecturer in medicine (diabetes/endocrinology) at the University of Bristol in 1995 and Head of Clinical Research at the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology in Bristol in 2002. In 2010, he was appointed to the Chair of Clinical Diabetes and Metabolism and Head of Section at Cardiff University School of Medicine. He served as Director of the Institute of Molecular and Experimental Medicine in 2011 – 2015. He has a long established interest in translational research in the immunopathology of type 1 diabetes and is currently conducting early phase clinical trials in the development of antigen specific immunotherapy. His clinical interests in diabetes include management of poor compliance in type 1 diabetes, public health measures in the prevention of type 2 diabetes and models of community care in diabetes. He is the lead for diabetes in the Cardiff whole pancreas transplantation programme and with colleagues leads an All Wales anonymised data linkage programme for monitoring childhood type 1 diabetes. He has been part of 2 major EU FP7 programme grants in type 1 diabetes (and coordinator on one), a member of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Medical and Scientific Committee and the Welsh Diabetes Research Unit. Prof Dayan currently leads the Clinical Engagement and Training Core of the Diabetes UK funded type 1 diabetes UK immunotherapy Consortium which aims to coordinate and support combined efforts to bring immunotherapy for type 1 diabetes into clinical practice, and is Chair of the Type 1 diabetes national Prevention and Therapies Clinical Studies Group. 

Research Interest

He has research interests in thyroid disease which include thyroid autoimmunity, thyroid hormone replacement and bioavailability, genetic epidemiology as applied to population variation in thyroid hormone bioavailability and thyroid eye disease. He became secretary of the European Thyroid Association in 2013 and chairs the UK Thyroid Eye Disease Amsterdam Implementation Group.