Dr. Timothy Lyons, Adult Endocrinology - MUSC Health

Timothy J. Lyons, M.D., joined MUSC in early 2017 as Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Endocrinology. A graduate of the Queen’s University, Belfast, he originally joined MUSC thirty years ago as a fellow. He worked with Dr. John A. Colwell, then Division Chief, and participated in the earliest stages of a landmark trial of patients with type 1 diabetes — the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT). As an MUSC faculty member in the 1990s, he began to collect samples from these participants, nationwide, for study in the laboratory. This lead to extensive studies aiming to find new ways to prevent complications of diabetes, and these have been ongoing ever since.

In the early 2000s, Dr. Lyons left MUSC to become Chief of Endocrinology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. There he built a multi specialty diabetes center, the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center, and contributed to the development of extensive collaborations with the state’s American Indian communities. Dr. Lyons was the inaugural holder of the Chickasaw Nation Chair in Diabetes. In his research, he continued to focus on mechanisms driving the vascular complications of diabetes, with specific interests in eye disease (retinopathy), atherogenesis, and complications of pregnancy, especially pre-eclampsia.

Now back at MUSC, Dr. Lyons is the first holder of the John A. Colwell Endowed Chair in Endocrinology and Diabetes. His return was motivated in part by a desire to safeguard the legacy of the DCCT, and to ensure this remarkable and unique study is seen to fruition. He also aims to recruit the next generation of clinical and translational investigators to continue MUSC’s long legacy of diabetes research into the coming decades.