Megan Kirk Chang

Dr. Megan Kirk Chang is a leading independent investigator at the intersection of metabolic health and severe mental illness. Based in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, she leads a subtheme on health behaviour-change interventions within the Oxford Health BRC Preventing Multiple Morbidities programme, working alongside Professor Amedeo Minichino. She is also the newly appointed Co-Lead of the Age Well Theme, and subtheme lead of the Optimising Brain and Heart Health stream within the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Thames Valley infrastructure. With 24 peer-reviewed publications, £500,000 (PI) and £30-million (Co-I) in competitive grant funding secured, and over two decades of principal investigator-level experience across healthcare systems in Canada, the USA, and the UK, she brings a rare combination of scientific rigour, translational reach, and clinical trial expertise to one of medicine's most urgent challenges.

Dr. Kirk Chang's programme of research empowers adults with severe mental illness to make sustainable lifestyle changes that simultaneously improve metabolic and mental health outcomes. She specialises in evidence synthesis, digitally-supported multicomponent intervention design, and co-design with people with lived experience ensuring that the interventions she builds are both scientifically robust and person-centred.

She is the Inaugural Fellow of the NexJ Health Metabolic Psychiatry Fellowship, awarded through the highly competitive NIHR Innovation Fellowship scheme. In this role, she is developing AI-assisted, digitally-supported ketogenic diet and GLP-1 lifestyle programmes that integrate wearable technology and behavioural adherence tools to address the metabolic-mental health crisis in people with severe mental illness at the Mental Health and Metabolism Clinic, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada.

Dr. Kirk Chang has designed, registered, and delivered 6 complex NIH-registered, multi-site randomised controlled trials across 15 sites and 3 countries, spanning dietary, exercise, and mindfulness-based interventions. Her trials integrate psychometric and objective mechanistic measures including gut microbiome profiling, morning cortisol, pupillometry, and HRV self-monitoring linking behavioural change to biological mechanism.

Landmark contributions include:

• DIME Trial — Co-lead investigator on the first RCT investigating a ketogenic diet for treatment-resistant depression [N=88; published in JAMA Psychiatry, 2026]. Her specific role encompassed protocol design, recruitment and adherence, supervision, and primary manuscript preparation.
• NIHR Team Science Award — Recipient of the first-ever NIHR Team Science Award (£100,000) as PI in first 6-months of arriving to the UK, leading a multi-disciplinary team to develop quality of life measurement tools for adults with multiple long-term conditions.
• Participant Adherence — Recognised as a specialist in the field, with a body of work across three international healthcare systems that has directly informed trial design and retention methodology internationally.

Dr. Kirk Chang holds a PhD in Kinesiology and Health Sciences and an Advanced Doctoral Diploma in Health Psychology from York University (Toronto, Canada). She completed postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine before joining Oxford. This Canada–USA–UK trajectory reflects an international expertise across markedly different healthcare contexts.

Dr. Kirk Chang is committed to building the next generation of academic researchers. Through her CuppaCoach initiative, she has mentored over 20 early-career scientists in PhD and Postdoctoral applications, grant writing, interview preparation, and academic career development.

Her public engagement work extends this commitment to scale. As a certified mindfulness and yoga instructor, she teaches evidence-based trauma-informed practices on the Insight Timer platform. Her course, The Wisdom of Our Wounds: Healing from Trauma, is followed by over 27,000 students worldwide, a reach that directly informs her co-design methodology and her approach to participant engagement in clinical research.

Dr. Kirk Chang's five-year agenda is to establish Metabolic Psychiatry as a distinct, evidence-based intervention science, developing and scaling digitally-supported, biologically-informed lifestyle programmes that are deployable across NHS and international healthcare systems. She is actively seeking collaborators, fellows, and institutional partners who share this vision.

For speaking engagements, research collaborations, or supervision enquiries, please email: Megan.kirkchang@psych.ox.ac.uk