Professor Ewan Pearson

Ewan Pearson is Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the University of Dundee, Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee. He has recently been appointed as an associate director of the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre, where he leads the Diabetes Data Catalyst. Ewan has been awarded the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Croom Lecture, the Diabetes UK RD Lawrence Lecture and Dorothy Hodgkin Lecture, and the EASD Minkowski Award. He was recently elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Ewan’s research interests have been in the phenotypic (Nair et al. Nature Medicine 2022a,) and genotypic determinants of drug response in diabetes, and in stratified approaches to the management of diabetes (Shields et al. Nature Medicine 2022b,c) .  Using the extensive prescribing and health record data linked to the GoDARTS bioresource his group have identified novel genetic variants associated with glycaemic response to metformin, sulphonylureas and GLP-1 Receptor Agonists (Zhou et al. Nature Genetics 2012, 2016; Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 2023). Ewan’s earlier work established that patients with monogenic diabetes did not need insulin treatment (Lancet 2003, NEJM 2006), paving the way for 1000s of patients to transition off long term insulin treatment onto oral medication. Ewan has recently been awarded £2.8M from the Chief Scientists Office to implement precision diabetes care within NHS Tayside.