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David Ray, MB ChB PhD (he/him/his)

Professor of Endocrinology
university of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom

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Professor David William Ray is a leading expert in circadian medicine and endocrinology, currently serving as Professor of Endocrinology at the University of Oxford and Head of the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM). He also holds an Honorary Consultant position at Oxford University Hospitals Trust and is a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.
Ray trained at the University of Manchester, graduating in medicine in 1987 before completing his PhD in 1994 on glucocorticoid resistance in lung cancer. He undertook postdoctoral research at UCLA before returning to Manchester, where he spent over two decades as a clinician-scientist, rising to Professor of Medicine and Endocrinology and serving as Associate Dean for Research. He moved to Oxford in 2018.
His research spans molecular biology to population genetics, with a particular focus on the circadian clock and its regulation of immunity, inflammation, and metabolic disease. He has a longstanding interest in nuclear receptor biology — especially the glucocorticoid receptor and REV-ERBα — and in chronopharmacology, the science of optimising drug timing for therapeutic benefit. He also leads major programmes examining sleep and circadian disruption as risk factors for cardiometabolic and psychiatric disease.
Ray has attracted over £12 million in peer-reviewed grant funding from bodies including the Wellcome Trust, MRC, BBSRC, and NIHR. He holds patents on selective glucocorticoid receptor agonists and has published extensively in journals such as Nature Genetics, PNAS, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Cell Metabolism. He has supervised 38 PhD students to completion.
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a recipient of the Society for Endocrinology Medal.

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