Niels Bohr Professor at the National Centre for Register-based Research

John McGrath 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 holds appointments at the University Of Queensland Discipline Of Psychiatry and the Queensland Brain Institute.  

His research aims to generate and evaluate nongenetic risk factors for schizophrenia.  He has forged productive cross-disciplinary collaborations linking risk factor epidemiology with developmental neurobiology (e.g. using animal models to explore candidate exposures). As part of a multidisciplinary team, John has made important discoveries related to the role of vitamin D in brain development and function. He has supervised major systematic reviews of the incidence, prevalence and mortality of schizophrenia – these have contributed to a substantial reappraisal of the epidemiology of this group of disorders. 

He has won several national and international awards including the Premier's Award for Medical Research, a Queensland-Smithsonian Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and the Organon Senior Research Award. The Australian government awarded John a Centenary Medal in 2003 and in 2007 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM). In 2013 he was awarded a prestigious John Cade Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). He is on the editorial boards of several international journals, and is an Associate Editor for Schizophrenia Bulletin. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and 25 book chapters. He is one of Australia’s most highly cited mental health researchers (H index 95, 53,000 total cites; Google Scholar).  In 2012-15 he served on two peak NHMRC committees – the Research Committee, and the Australian Health Ethics Committee. He is a Board Member of Research Australia. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and in 2016 he was awarded a prestigious Niels Bohr Professorship, based at the National Centre for Register-based Research, Aarhus University, Denmark.