Honorary Professor: Richard R Meehan

Richard Meehan has been awarded an Honorary Professorship with the College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine.

Professor Meehan is Group Leader of Chromosome Biology at the MRC Human Genetics Unit based at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. He is Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit.

He studied Genetics at Trinity College Dublin and was supervised during his PhD in Edinburgh by Professors Nick Hastie and Roland Wolf.

Further training at the Vienna's Research Institute of Molecular Pathology with Adrian Bird and later at Edinburgh was centred on epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation.

He continued the epigenetic theme on setting up a lab at the University of Edinburgh Biochemistry Department in 1995.

In collaboration with Professor Lorraine Young and Professor Sir Ian Wilmut, he and his colleagues demonstrated altered DNA methylation patterns in cloned sheep.

In 2003, he joined the MRC Edinburgh Human Genetics Unit, moving into mammalian systems to take advantage of ‘omics’ technologies.

The collaborative Breakthrough Breast Cancer group showed that aberrantly methylated genes distinguish breast tumours of different lineages.

Current work investigates the newly discovered modification, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), and its dynamic role in the DNA methylation network.

His PhD interest in toxicology has continued as a member of the (MARCAR) consortium. This aims to develop short-term assays indicative of exposure to non-genotoxic carcinogens with an emphasis on epigenomics.