Dr. Griffin studied chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went on to do postgraduate research in biochemistry, gaining his DPhil from Oxford in 1999 after studying in the laboratory of Professor George Radda. Following this he held Postdoctoral posts as a Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Fellow in Radiology, as a research associate at Imperial College London, and, later, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (UK). He was formally appointed as a University Lecturer (the US equivalent to an associate professor) at Cambridge University in 2007. Dr. Griffin's group uses a range of analytical techniques including NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (they have access to a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer, a Thermo LTQ ion trap, a Waters QTOF Ultima, a Waters Quattro Premiere triple quadrupole LCMS, and two GC-MS), to follow metabolism in the brain to look at a range of disease processes. The majority of his work has centered on mouse models of disease including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses. More recently, Dr. Griffin's group has been using a combination of animal models (mouse, rat, and C.elegans) to understand the metabolic consequences of "metabolic syndrome" including type II diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease, and dyslipidaemia. His studies have attempted to cross-correlate metabolomic data with proteomics and transcriptomics to create a "systems biology" description of the consequences of pathology and genetic modulation related to the metabolic syndrome.