Julian Parkhill - Biography#

J. Parkhill(JP) is currently a professor in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. His research interests are focussed on the evolution of bacterial pathogens, and his group uses large-scale genomics to understand their origin and transmission, and how they adapt to selective pressure such as antibiotics and vaccines. Over the last few years his group has identified the global origin and routes of spread of many human and animal pathogens, and discovered mechanisms of resistance to antibiotics and evasion of vaccines. JP and his group are also interested in bacterial communities, and have studied the microbiota of key body sites including the lung and the gut, to uncover associations with health and disease.

Their work on transmission is directly applicable to clinical settings, and they have worked with local hospitals, national and international agencies, as well as the commercial sector, to enable hospital transmission and outbreak detection using genomics. Before moving to Cambridge in 2019, JP worked at the Wellcome Sanger Institute for 20 years where he was responsible for generating reference sequences for many major bacterial pathogens, and instigated large-scale population genomics to understand bacterial transmission and evolution.