Colin Dayan MA, MBChB, PhD, FRCP

Colin Dayan trained in medicine at University College, Oxford, and Guy's and Charing Cross Hospitals in London, UK before obtaining a PhD in the cellular immunology of Graves' Disease in the Laboratory of Marc Feldmann. He then spent a year as an endocrine fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA before completing his specialist training in diabetes and endocrinology as a Lecturer in Bristol. He became a consultant senior lecturer in medicine (diabetes/endocrinology) at the University of Bristol in 1995 and Head of Clinical Research at the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology in Bristol in 2002. In 2010, he was appointed to the Chair of Clinical Diabetes and Metabolism and Head of Section at Cardiff University School of Medicine. He served as Director of the Institute of Molecular and Experimental Medicine in 2011 – 2015 and was appointed as Cardiff Joint Research Office Director in 2021. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Univesity of Oxford and a Fellow of the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland.

Dayan has a long-established interest in translational research in the immunopathology of type 1 diabetes (T1D). He has been Chief Investigator on more than 15 phase I-III clinical trials of immunotherapies to preserve beta cell function (T1D) and leads the UK T1D Research Consortium clinical trials network with 30 clinical sites across the UK. He supported the application to the FDA for the first licensed Immunotherapy for T1D in 2022. He was awarded the Sir Derrick Melville Dunlop Medal from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 2019 and the JDRF International/Breakthrough T1D David Rumbough prize in 2024.

Dayan also has research interests in thyroid disease which include thyroid autoimmunity, thyroid hormone replacement and bioavailability, genetic epidemiology as applied to population variation in thyroid hormone bioavailability, and thyroid eye disease. He became secretary of the European Thyroid Association in 2013 and chairs the UK Thyroid Eye Disease Amsterdam Implementation Group. From 2016-2022 he was secretary/treasurer of the Association of Physicians and since 2019 has been the Clinical Research Secretary of the British Society of Immunology.