Professor Philippa Mills

Biography

Professor of Inherited Metabolic Diseases, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, London, U.K.

Prof. Philippa Mills received her BSc in Biochemistry from Cardiff University in 1991 and her PhD in Biochemistry in 1995. She began her scientific career as a Postdoctoral Scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, and subsequently joined the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (GOS ICH) in 1999 as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mass Spectrometry Unit. It was here that she began her work in the field of inherited metabolic diseases.

In 2006, she was awarded the Horst Bickel Prize for her pioneering research into inborn errors of vitamin B6 metabolism. In 2010, she received an NIHR Biomedical Research Centre Fellowship, shortly before being appointed Lecturer in Metabolic Paediatrics at the UCL Institute of Child Health. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and to Professor in 2021. Her research focuses on improving the diagnosis and treatment of children with inherited metabolic disorders, particularly those causing neurological disease, including the vitamin B6-dependent epilepsies.

Prof. Mills has supervised 11 PhD students and has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, including in Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Science Translational Medicine, American Journal of Human Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Brain. Her research has attracted over £7 million in grant funding.

She also serves as Executive Director and Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Inborn Errors of Metabolism (SSIEM), the largest international society in this field, with more than 1,600 members.