Professor Peter Croucher

Professor Peter Croucher is a bone biologist and cancer researcher, with a longstanding fascination for disorders of the skeleton, particularly osteoporosis and cancer-associated bone disease. He has a particular interest in the molecular mechanisms of bone disease, in how cancers spread to bone, and what controls dormancy (sleeping) and reactivation of cancer cells within bone. He is motivated by the clinical impacts that his research has already had, and by the potential for widespread future impacts on bone disease, cancer relapse and metastasis.

Peter heads the Garvan Institute of Medical Research’s Bone Biology Lab. He also leads and co-leads a number of international research consortia, including ProMis (PROstate Cancer MetastasIS; co-funded by Movember and the Prostate Cancer Foundation) and the Wellcome Trust-funded Origins of Bone & Cartilage Disease program.

His postdoctoral training was at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sheffield. He relocated to the University of Oxford’s Institute of Musculoskeletal Sciences as a Senior Research Fellow in 2001, returning to the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Sheffield in 2003 as Professor of Bone Biology. In 2009 Peter formed and led the new Department of Human Metabolism, and became the inaugural co-Director of the Mellanby Centre for Bone Research.

In 2011, Peter moved to Garvan to lead its Division of Bone Biology and to take up the inaugural Mrs Janice Gibson & the Ernest Heine Family Foundation Chair in Osteoporosis. He leads Garvan’s Healthy Ageing research theme, which brings together a multidisciplinary group of over 150 researchers and clinician-scientists who study osteoporosis, cancer in bone, type 2 diabetes and disorders of metabolism, neurodegenerative diseases, other neurological conditions and hearing. From 2022 to 2023 he was also Garvan’s Executive Director (interim), with responsibilities for whole-of-institute scientific affairs.