Executive Director (interim), Professor Peter Croucher 

Professor Peter Croucher joined Garvan in 2011 and is the current Executive Director (interim). Peter is a bone biologist and cancer researcher, with a longstanding fascination for disorders of the skeleton, particularly osteoporosis and cancer-associated bone disease.  

Before becoming Executive Director, Peter was Deputy Director of Garvan, and led Garvan’s Healthy Ageing Research.  

Professor John Shine  

Professor John Shine was Garvan’s Executive Director from 1990–2011. His name is known to most undergraduate biology students for his role in defining the Shine-Dalgarno gene sequence, which is responsible for the initiation and termination of protein-synthesis.   

John has several other significant scientific ‘firsts’ under his belt. He was the first to clone a human hormone gene; he was responsible for cloning of an endorphin gene; and he was the first to demonstrate that hormone genes cloned in bacteria could be expressed in a biologically active form. He also determined the first sequence responsible for replication of a cancer-causing virus. 

Dr Warren Kidson  

Dr Warren Kidson has had a distinguished career as an endocrinologist and researcher in the area of type 1 diabetes. After graduating from UNSW Medicine, Dr Warren Kidson trained in paediatric diabetes at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, while working in adult diabetes and endocrinology at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. His premise was that the complications of type 1 diabetes seen in early adulthood begin to develop in childhood. He started the first camp for adolescents with diabetes in NSW and later edited Diabetes Conquest, the national magazine for people with diabetes. 

In 1998, Warren was one of the first clinicians in the world to treat women with polycystic ovarian syndrome with metformin. At the time this drug was used exclusively for type 2 diabetes.  

Professor Chris Goodnow 

Professor Chris Goodnow is a world-renowned immunologist who joined Garvan in 2015 and took up the role of Executive Director in 2018. His research focus is to understand the cause of immune disorders and develop more effective, personalised treatments. Scientifically, Chris is best known for integrating molecular genetics and genomics with immunology. He leads Hope Research – a transformative research program that aims to uncover a common cause for all autoimmune disease. He holds The Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation Chair as Head of the Immunogenomics Lab, is an NHMRC Investigator, and is Professor and Director of the Cellular Genomics Futures Institute at UNSW Sydney. 

Professor Susan Clark 

Professor Susan Clark is a molecular biologist by training and is the Head of the Epigenetics Laboratory at Garvan. In 2004 Susan started at Garvan and led the Epigenetics Research Program in Cancer Research. Her DNA methylation studies over the last 25 years have initiated profound questions about the importance of epigenetics in early development and in disease, especially in cancer. Susan has made extensive ground-breaking discoveries relating to DNA methylation patterns in normal and cancer genomes, that have led to the commercialisation of new methylation-based tests for early cancer detection.  

The techniques she pioneered in the early 1990s have revolutionised and now underpin epigenomic research.