Professor John McGrath AM, MBBS, MD, PhD, FRANZCP is a psychiatrist interested in discovering the causes of serious mental disorders. He is the Director of the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and conjoint Professor at the Queensland Brain Institute. John received his medical degree from the University of Queensland. After working as a community-based psychiatrist, he moved into full-time research, becoming the Director of the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in 1990. He attended Marist Brothers College. Ashgrove from 1965-
1974. His research aims to generate and evaluate non-genetic risk factors for schizophrenia.
He has forged productive cross-disciplinary collaborations linking risk factor epidemiology with developmental neurobiology. For example,John and his colleagues have made discoveries linking prenatal vitamin D and later risk of mental illness in the offspring. ln addition, John has supervised major systematic reviews of the epidemiology of schizophrenia. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles and 25 book chapters, and is one of Australia’s most highly cited mental health researchers. ln 2007 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to medicine in the field of schizophrenia research. He was awarded a John Cade Fellowship by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council in 2013. ln 2016 he was also awarded a Niels Bohr Professorship by the Danish National Research Foundation. The following year, he was awarded the prestigious Erik Stromgren medal, at a ceremony in Aarhus, Denmark.