Tim Wiltshire’s current research focus centers on preclinical pharmacogenetics using mouse models. Wiltshire received a BS in organic chemistry from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and then went on to become certified as a high school teacher. He taught high school for a number of years in New Zealand and then made a career change and come to the US to pursue a PhD. He received his PhD in biochemistry and cell and molecular biology from the University of Tennessee and then went on to postdoctoral research positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation as a scientist and over eight years became a senior research investigator there. The main direction of his research was mouse models of disease, genetics and genomics, and a focus on developing resources (SNPs, gene expression, and genetic analysis methods) using inbred strains of mice. The major theme of this work was to identify novel drug targets for the Novartis drug-discovery pipeline.  

Wiltshire is now an associate professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and an associate director of the UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. He also holds adjunct faculty positions in the Department of Genetics of the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and is actively involved with several collaborations with the Hamner Health Sciences Institute.