Dr Anna Gloyn joined the faculty at Stanford University in February 2020 after sixteen years at the University of Oxford, UK. Dr Gloyn completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford under the supervision of the late Professor Robert Turner. Her post-doctoral training was carried out at the University of Exeter under the mentorship of Professors Andrew Hattersley & Sian Ellard and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia under the mentorship of Professor Franz Matschinsky. In 2004 she returned to Oxford with a Diabetes UK RD Lawrence Career Development Fellowship and established an independent research group focused on understanding beta-cell function through the investigation of genetic variants causally implicated in monogenic diabetes. In 2011 she was awarded a prestigious Wellcome Senior Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science which she successfully renewed in 2016 and transferred to Stanford when she relocated.
Dr Gloyn’s research uses human genetics as a tool to understand cellular and molecular mechanisms for pancreatic beta cell failure in diabetes and related conditions. She joined the Stanford faculty in 2020. She deploys a number of complementary approaches, including functional genomics, human cell models and integrative physiology to study both monogenic forms of diabetes due to rare mutations which are causal for disease through to common variants present in most of the population which increase an individual’s risk for developing diabetes. The aim of her research is to capitalize on an improved mechanistic understanding of pancreatic islet cell dysfunction to improve treatment options for patients via the identification of safe and effective therapeutic targets (drug development) and patient stratification (precision medicine). Dr Gloyn is a leader in efforts to discover the genetic basis of Type 2 diabetes and related glycemic traits, including the NIDDK funded Accelerated Medicines Partnership for Type 2 Diabetes (AMP-T2D), and is the co-lead for the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA) Flagship Disease (Diabetes) working group. Her research has direct translational relevance evidenced by her roles on both the ClinGen Expert Review Group for Variant Curation for Monogenic Diabetes and role as chair and co-lead for Precision Diagnostics in Monogenic Diabetes for the American Diabetes Association Precision Medicine Working group. Dr Gloyn is also on the executive committee of the Atlas of Variant Effects (AVE) Alliance which is advancing the systematic measurement of sequence variation in clinically actionable genes, including those involved in monogenic diabetes. She is co-leader of the Pancreas and Islet Research Affinity Group of SDRC.
