Kathleen has led Diabetes and Metabolism since November 2014, when she also became Chief Investigator of the Bart's Oxford (BOX) family study of type 1 diabetes. She is a molecular biologist interested in the mechanisms underlying autoimmunity. Her current projects include:
1. an international collaborative study of why some children develop type 1 diabetes in the first few years of life while others who have the markers of ongoing islet autoimmunity are not diagnosed until adulthood;
2. examining longitudinal genetic and islet autoantibody data from the BOX study to predict outcomes;
3. developing new biomarker assays;
4. understanding why children with Down's syndrome are at increased risk of autoimmunity