Sharon Peacock - Biography#

Sharon is a clinician scientist who has worked in academic microbiology in the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia for the last 25 years. She has built her scientific expertise around pathogen genomics, antimicrobial resistance, and a range of tropical diseases. She has a particular interest in demonstrating public health benefit from applying sequencing technologies to pathogens.

After training as a general physician, Sharon specialised in clinical microbiology and virology and worked as a hospital-based consultant. Parallel research training funded by Wellcome Fellowships supported an early focus on Staphylococcus aureus (including MRSA), followed after relocation to the Wellcome Unit in Thailand by research on melioidosis, leptospirosis and rickettsial infections. She has concentrated in the last decade on the utility of pathogen genomics for the control of outbreaks and antibiotic resistance.

Sharon has held a range of board, non-executive, governor, trustee and advisory positions. Currently, she is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge; Executive Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK, which has generated >1 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes); Non-Executive Director on the Board of the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust where she also chairs the Quality Committee; and honorary consultant microbiologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.

Sharon has published over 500 scientific papers and 22 book chapters and has raised over £60 million GB pounds in academic research funding. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and an elected Member of EMBO. In 2015, Sharon received a CBE for services to medical microbiology, and in 2017 was made an NIHR Senior Investigator. In 2018, Sharon won the Unilever Colworth Prize for her outstanding contribution to translational microbiology. In 2021, she was awarded the Medical Research Council Millennium Medal.