Professor Byrne trained as a clinical scientist in the UK and the US, at Cardiff, Cambridge and Stanford Universities and undertook a PhD studying liver lipid metabolism at Cambridge University.After a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University and then an MRC fellowship at Cambridge University, Prof Byrne was appointed in 1999 to the Chair of Endocrinology & Metabolism at the University of Southampton and was inaugural Director of the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility at Southampton.
Professor Byrne is a Metabolic Physician, is currently Principal Investigator within the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, has published over 350 publications related to metabolic syndrome and NAFLD, was a former recipient of the Dorothy Hodgkin prize for research excellence related to diabetes, and was the expert diabetologist advisor to the NICE NAFLD Guidelines.