Rate My Professor Jim Wilson

Professor Jim Wilson is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, holding a Personal Chair of Human Genetics in the School of Population Health Sciences. He is affiliated with the Usher Institute and the MRC Human Genetics Unit in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Of Fair Isle heritage, he grew up in Orkney and attended Kirkwall Grammar School before reading genetics at the University of Edinburgh, where he earned a Bachelor of Science with first-class honours in 1997. He completed a DPhil in human population genetics at the University of Oxford in 2002, working with David Goldstein, and spent time working with Svante Pääbo in Bavaria. After a period at University College London, Wilson returned to Edinburgh in 2003 to take up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

Wilson’s research spans the interface of population and disease genetics, with a focus on the genetic architecture of complex traits and the identification of variants influencing risk factors for common diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. He leads the Viking Genes studies, including ORCADES, VIKING, VIKING II and VIKING III, recruiting participants from the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland to create platform resources for health research with rich phenotyping, deep genotyping and prospective follow-up. He steers the international ROHgen consortium investigating runs of homozygosity and inbreeding effects on complex traits across more than 1.4 million participants. Wilson has published over 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, with many appearing in Nature Genetics and Nature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In addition to his research, Wilson has contributed to public understanding of genetics through radio and television series and a book on Scottish genetic history.