Peter McGuffin
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Peter McGuffin was born in Belfast, Ireland and emigrated with his parents at aged 10 to the Isle of Wight. He first decided that he wanted to be a psychiatrist at the age of 16 after coming across (something he’d never heard of before) Freud’s ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, in a local public library. He attended medical school at the University of Leeds, England where he graduated in 1972 and then received postgraduate training in internal medicine. It was at this stage that he became interested in genetics and had his first publications on immunogenetic aspects of coronary heart disease. He transferred this interest to psychiatric disorders and carried out one of the first genetic marker association studies on schizophrenia.He completed his training as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, London and was awarded a Medical Research Council Fellowship to study genetics at London University and at Washington University, St Louis Missouri.He subsequently became an MRC Senior Clinical Fellow at the Maudsley and the Institute of Psychiatry and then took up the Chair of Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff in 1987. He succeeded Prof Sir Michael Rutter as Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry in October 1998. Despite his very early Freudian leanings Peter McGuffin’s research, his books and papers have been mainly on the genetics of normal and abnormal behavior. He is married with 3 grown up children and his interests outside of work include horse riding, playing the classical guitar and running with his dogs.
