Tim Spector

Biography

Professor Tim Spector OBE is a professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London and honorary consultant physician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital. He is a multi-award-winning expert in personalised medicine and the gut microbiome, and the author of five books, including the bestsellers Spoon-Fed and The Diet Myth and his most recent, Food for Life.

He is past President of the International Society of Twin Studies, directs the European Twin Registry Consortium (Discotwin) and collaborates with over 120 centres worldwide. For leading the work in creating the COVID Symptom Tracker App over the covid-19 crisis, Tim was awarded an OBE.

Tim has demonstrated the genetic basis of a wide range of common complex traits, many previously thought to be mainly due to ageing and environment. Through genetic association studies (GWAS), his group have found over five hundred novel gene loci in over fifty disease areas. He has published over eight hundred research articles and is ranked as being in the top one percent of the world’s most cited scientists by Thomson-Reuters. 

He held a prestigious European Research Council senior investigator award in epigenetics and is a NIHR Senior Investigator. Tim’s current work focuses on omics and the microbiome and directs the crowdfunded British Gut microbiome project. He is a prolific writer with several popular science books and a regular blog, focusing on genetics, epigenetics and most recently microbiome and diet (The Diet Myth). 

Tim is the scientific co-founder of the personalised nutrition company ZOE, and leads the world’s biggest citizen science health project, the ZOE Health study. The app has over four million users in the UK, US, and Sweden, and provides insights into how your body responds to food by a gut health and blood fat test and a blood sugar sensor. Using the results, the program shows users how to build new habits to improve their microbiome by following the program. More than eighty per cent of members have reported improved energy levels and feeling less hungry having undertaken it.