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: 

Tom has an eclectic research background. He graduated with a 1^st Class Honours degree in Biochemistry from the (ranked 1^st in Class). Subsequently, he undertook doctoral research on the Wellcome Trust Four-Year PhD Programme in Integrative Neuroscience at , UK. He completed his PhD studies in developmental neurobiology under the guidance of , co-supervised by . Following a short post-doctoral period in the Davies Lab, Tom was recruited by Dario R. Alessi FMedSci FRS to the at the , Scotland. Here, he worked with and 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)