John S. O'Neill

The O'Neill group’s research is focused on the evolution and mechanisms of circadian timekeeping in eukaryotic cells, and how biological clocks regulate cellular function to impact upon human health and disease. In a 2019 paper, published in the journal Cell, the group identified insulin as a primary signal synchronizing mammalian circadian rhythms with feeding time. In 2017, the lab also demonstrated that cell-autonomous circadian regulation of actin dynamics in fibroblast and other skin cells leads to differences in cell migration during wound healing that depend on the biological time of day that the wound was incurred. These findings predicted the striking 40% difference in the number of days that human burn injuries required to heal which they subsequently identified. Most recently, the O'Neill lab has been working to determine the basis for understanding metabolic oscillations in yeast.

O'Neill was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship in 2011 and in 2013 was recruited to become an independent group leader in the Cell Biology Division of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 2016, he was awarded an EMBO Young Investigator Prize. In collaboration with Cairn Research, O'Neill pioneered the development of the ALLIGATOR for long-term bioluminescence imaging.

John Stuart O’Neill (born 2 June 1979) is a British molecular and circadian biologist. O’Neill is currently a Principal Investigator at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. His work focuses on the fundamental mechanisms that sustain circadian rhythms in eukaryotic cells.