Kathleen has led Diabetes and Metabolism since November 2014, when she also became Chief Investigator of the Bart's Oxford (BOX) family study of type 1 diabetes. She is a molecular biologist interested in the mechanisms underlying autoimmunity. Her current projects include

• the first natural history study of risk of type 1 diabetes in the general population adults (Type 1 diabetes risk in adults - T1DRA)
• an international collaborative study of why some children develop type 1 diabetes in the first few years of life while others who have the markers of ongoing islet autoimmunity are not diagnosed until adulthood
• examining longitudinal genetic and islet autoantibody data from the BOX study to predict outcomes
• developing new biomarker assays 
• understanding why children with Down's syndrome are at increased risk of autoimmunity 

Current funding has been provided by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, NIDDK, Diabetes UK, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and the European Foundation for the study of diabetes.