Dr. Alastair Garfield joined Rhythm in July 2024 as Chief Scientific Officer. He rejoins Rhythm after serving as Senior Vice President and Head of Translational Sciences and Strategy at Rectify Pharma, where he helped deliver first-in-class therapeutics for rare disease. Prior to joining Rectify, Dr. Garfield was Senior Vice President and Head of Translational Research at Rhythm. He also held roles at Pfizer, where he was a lab head in the Cardiovascular Metabolic Disease Research Unit and led novel obesity target identification.

Dr. Garfield’s holds a first-class degree in molecular and cellular biology and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of Bath, UK. His postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cardiff, UK and University of Cambridge, UK focused on neural pathways and genes underlying mammalian energy balance. As an assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh, UK and visiting professor Harvard Medical School, Dr. Garfield’s independent research expanded the field’s understanding of the hypothalamic melanocrotinergic networks regulating metabolism, body weight and appetite. His research has been published in leading scientific journals including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, and Cell Metabolism. Dr Garfield has authored numerous original research and review articles on the MC4R pathway, including “Melanocortin-4 receptor-regulated energy homeostasis,” which was published in Nature Neuroscience in 2016 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26814590/).