Rate My Professor John O'Neill

John Stuart O'Neill is a Principal Investigator in the Cell Biology Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He studied biochemistry as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, before completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2007 under the supervision of Michael Hastings at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. His doctoral research examined cAMP-dependent signalling in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. For postdoctoral work, O'Neill investigated circadian rhythms in plants and algae at the University of Edinburgh with Andrew Millar and subsequently in human cells at the University of Cambridge with Akhilesh Reddy.

O'Neill was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship in 2011 and joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as an independent group leader in 2013. In 2016 he received an EMBO Young Investigator award. His research focuses on the fundamental mechanisms of circadian timekeeping in eukaryotic cells and how biological clocks regulate cellular function with implications for health and disease. Notable contributions include 2011 Nature papers demonstrating that transcriptional cycles are not essential for circadian rhythms in human red blood cells and algal cells, as well as later work identifying insulin as a key synchroniser of mammalian rhythms with feeding time and showing circadian regulation of actin dynamics that affects wound healing. O'Neill has contributed to the development of tools for long-term bioluminescence imaging and serves in editorial roles, including as Editor-in-Chief of npj Biological Timing and Sleep.

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