Sir Mark Walport | |
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![]() Mark Walport | |
Born | Mark Jeremy Walport 25 January 1953 [1] London, England |
Education | St Paul's School, London |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge (PhD) [1] |
Known for |
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Spouse | Julia Elizabeth Neild (m. 1986) |
Children | 4 [1] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Immunology Rheumatology |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The biology of complement receptors (1986) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Lachmann [5] |
Website | gov |
Sir Mark Jeremy Walport (born 25 January 1953 [1] ) is an English medical scientist and was the Government Chief Scientific Adviser in the United Kingdom from 2013 to 2017 [3] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] and Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) from 2017 [13] to 2020. [14] In 2023 he became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society (jointly with Alison Noble). [15]
Walport is the son of a general practitioner and was born in London. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, [1] studied medicine at Clare College, Cambridge, and completed his clinical training at Hammersmith, Guy's and Brompton Hospitals in London. [16] [17] He was awarded a PhD for research into complement receptors under the supervision of Peter Lachmann in 1986 at the University of Cambridge. [18]
Previously Walport was Director of the Wellcome Trust from 2003 to 2013. [2] Before this, he was Professor of Medicine (from 1991) and Head of the Division of Medicine (from 1997) at Imperial College London, [16] where he led a research team that focused on the immunology and genetics of rheumatic diseases. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]
Walport was the eleventh Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2013 to 2017, succeeding Sir John Beddington.
It was announced in February 2017 that Mark Walport is now Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). [13]
Walport was knighted in the 2009 New Year Honours list for services to medical research. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2017 [27] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2011. [4] [16] His nomination for the Royal Society reads:
Mark Walport has an overwhelming case for election both for his earlier scientific work on the immunology of systemic LE and the role of complement and of defective apoptosis in its pathogenesis; and, as a general candidate, for his achievements as head of medicine at the Hammersmith Campus of Imperial College and since 2003 as Director of the Wellcome Trust. In the latter role he has provided national and international leadership at the highest level on biomedical research and policy issues and is widely recognised as a world leader in the promotion of biomedical science. [4]
Walport is married to Dr Julia Walport MBE (nee Neild), master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. Lady Walport is a trustee of the Amber Trust and of Ealing Youth Orchestra. She was made MBE in the 2024 New Year Honours.
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Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases. He is the author, with Robert May, of the most highly cited book in this field, entitled Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. His early work was on the population ecology of infectious agents before focusing on the epidemiology and control of human infections. His published research includes studies of the major viral, bacterial and parasitic infections of humans, wildlife and livestock. This has included major studies on HIV, SARS, foot and mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), influenza A, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the neglected tropical diseases and most recently COVID-19. Anderson is the author of over 650 peer-reviewed scientific articles with an h-index of 125.
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
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Sir John Stewart Savill, FRS, FMedSci is the Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK and the Head of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and a Vice Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
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Eleanor Anne Maguire was an Irish neuroscientist who was Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, where she was also a Wellcome Trust principal research fellow, from 2007 until her death in 2025.
Sir Ian Lamont Boyd, is a Scottish zoologist, environmental and polar scientist, former Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and is a professor of biology at the University of St Andrews. He is Chair of the UK Research Integrity Office and President of the Royal Society of Biology.
Sir Jeremy James Farrar is a British medical researcher who has served as Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization since 2023. He was previously the director of The Wellcome Trust from 2013 to 2023 and a professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford.
Gordon Dougan is a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and head of pathogen research and a member of the board of management at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. During his career, Dougan has pioneered work on enteric diseases and been heavily involved in the movement to improve vaccine usage in developing countries. In this regard he was recently voted as one of the top ten most influential people in the vaccine world by people working in the area.
Sir James Cuthbert Smith is an Emeritus Scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, Honorary Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and President of the Council at the Zoological Society of London.
Sarah Amalia Teichmann is a German scientist, the former head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory, Professor at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, and is a senior research fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.
David Chaim Rubinsztein is the Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research (CIMR), Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics at the University of Cambridge and a UK Dementia Research Institute Professor.
Sir Douglass Matthew Turnbull is professor of neurology at Newcastle University, an honorary consultant neurologist at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research.
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Patrick John Thompson Vallance, Baron Vallance of Balham, is a British physician, scientist, life peer, and clinical pharmacologist who has served as Minister of State for Science in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology since July 2024. He previously served as HM Government chief scientific adviser from 2018 to 2023.
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