Keith Godfrey - Biography#

Early in his clinical academic career, Keith’s research with David Barker identified relations between fetal nutrition and adult cardiovascular, metabolic and chronic obstructive airways diseases, now known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (“DOHaD”). In highly-cited papers he delineated the role of developmental plasticity, and the conceptual basis for lifecourse and transgenerational effects of developmental plasticity. He provided the first substantive human evidence that epigenetic mechanisms are central to phenotypic alterations induced by the developmental environment, linking pregnancy nutrition to epigenetic changes that increase offspring susceptibility to childhood obesity. Such adaptive ‘tuning’ confers Darwinian fitness advantage because it either adjusts the phenotype to current circumstances, and/or attempts to match individual responses to the environment predicted to be experienced later. More recently he characterised perinatal DNA methylation variations related to ANRIL (Antisense long Non-coding RNA in the INK4 Locus) that mark obesity risk, replicated across three populations and with relevant physiological effects of altering ANRIL methylation in vitro. His research has characterised the origins of lifetime health around conception, the roles of maternal obesity, fetal liver blood flow, postnatal evolution of the infant microbiome and early biomarkers of later health.

Keith’s intervention studies to improve life chances through optimising early development include strengthening nutrition/health literacy in 11,500 teenagers (LifeLab), and demonstration of offspring benefits from a low glycemic index pregnancy diet in obese women and from gestational vitamin D supplementation. He is Chief Investigator on a major international preconception nutritional supplementation trial and has published 483 peer reviewed papers, and 66 reviews/book chapters, and has been an invited speaker at >200 national/international scientific meetings.