Sharon Peacock | |
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Born | Sharon Jayne Hardstaffe 24 March 1959 |
Alma mater | University of Southampton (BM) Open University (PhD) |
Spouse | Peter Peacock (m. 1983) |
Children | 3 [1] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Pathogens Genomics Clinical practice Public health [3] |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Staphylococcal fibronectin-binding proteins (2003) |
Website | www |
Sharon Jayne Peacock CBE FMedSci MRCP (born 24 March 1959) [1] is a British microbiologist who is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. [3] [4] Peacock also sits on Cambridge University Council. [5]
Peacock is known for her work on the use of microbial whole genome sequencing in diagnostic and public health microbiology, for research and policy work relating to antimicrobial resistance, and for her research on Burkholderia pseudomallei and Staphylococcus aureus including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
In 2020, she led the development of the COG-UK consortium, which provided genomic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the pandemic response.
Peacock became a non-executive director on the board of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2015, [6] and senior independent director in 2023. She was appointed as a trustee to the Board of the Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust in 2023.
Peacock will become the 8th Master of Churchill College, Cambridge in October 2024. [7]
Having failed her eleven-plus (11+) exam, Peacock left school aged 16 to work in a corner shop. She then trained as a dental nurse, before entering training as a state registered nurse. On completing nursing training, she specialised in end-of-life care and studied part-time for A-levels. She enrolled to study medicine at the University of Southampton in 1983, and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine (BM) degree in 1988. [1] Following this, she did four years of postgraduate training in London, Brighton and Oxford, during which she obtained Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians (MRCP). She completed the Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1994.
Peacock was awarded a Wellcome Trust research training fellowship in microbiology in 1995, supporting a PhD conducted at the University of Oxford and Trinity College Dublin and awarded in 2003 by the Open University for her work on fibronectin-binding proteins in the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus . [8] Training in clinical microbiology led to membership of the Royal College of Pathologists (MRCPath) in 1997. [1] She was awarded a BA in History by the Open University in 1995, studied alongside higher medical training. Peacock completed the Non-Executive Director diploma with the Financial Times in 2017.
Peacock's work is particularly focused upon developing diagnostic and public health innovations from genome sequencing technologies. [3] [4] [9]
From 1998, Peacock worked as senior lecturer in clinical microbiology at the University of Oxford. In 2002 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award, and moved to the Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, Thailand where she was head of bacterial diseases research for seven years. During this time, she began collaboration with teams at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute [10] on whole genome sequencing of a range of pathogens.
On returning to the UK in 2009, Peacock became Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, heading the Peacock Lab. [11] She also took up honorary consultant positions with the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and the Health Protection Agency, a public body advising on protecting public health. She maintained a research programme in Thailand, working on the molecular epidemiology of Leptospira , infection mechanisms of Burkholderia pseudomallei and melioidosis. [10] Peacock has published around 150 papers on these topics. [12] She was a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 2013 to 2015 and was elected as an Honorary Fellow in 2022.[ citation needed ]
Peacock led a working group for the Department of Health's 100,000 Genomes Project and in 2017 contributed to the UK Chief Medical Officer's annual report on antimicrobial resistance. [13]
In 2015, Peacock was appointed the founding director of the Bloomsbury Research Institute, a £50 million research facility intended to investigate new treatments, vaccines, and methods of diagnosing, preventing and controlling diseases. [14]
In 2019, Peacock returned to the University of Cambridge as Professor of Public Health and Microbiology. In the same year she took up a secondment as Director of the National Infection Service, [15] a department of Public Health England (PHE) which operates laboratories working on bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. [16] By 2020 Peacock was seconded to the position of Director of Science at PHE, and was a member of PHE's management committee. [17] She was the founding director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), established in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to collaborate on whole genome sequencing of the virus. [18] [19]
Peacock's appointment as the 8th Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, with effect from October 2024, was announced in October 2023. [7]
Large-scale research conducted by Peacock involved studies of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and in 2017 her study into the superbug was published in Science Translational Medicine . [20] [21] She continues to research pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and multidrug resistant bacilli, and to conduct studies aimed at identifying reservoirs of antimicrobial resistance. [9] [22] [23] [24]
Peacock's research has been funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Department of Health and the Wellcome Trust.
In March 2020, Peacock convened a scientific group of national genomics experts to develop plans for a nationwide pandemic SARS-CoV-2 sequencing network. This created the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium.
Peacock led this consortium of 16 academic institutions, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and the four public health agencies of the UK, which became networked with more than a hundred NHS diagnostic and high-throughput COVID-19 testing ("lighthouse") labs. Around 600 people contributed to the consortium outputs.
This capability was used to detect new variants that alter vaccine efficacy, disease severity and/or transmissibility, and was critically important for public health interventions and vaccine roll-out. Consortium members undertook research that revealed patterns of viral introductions and spread at local, national, and international levels. They played a key role in the detection of global Variants of Concern, which began with the description of the transmissible Alpha variant first detected in Kent, UK. Sequencing subsequently detected other Variants of Concern and Interest.
COG-UK generated over a million SARS-CoV-2 genomes for use in the pandemic response. These were released into global open access databases, prior to formal handover of sequencing responsibilities to public health agencies.
Peacock was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2002, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2005.
Peacock was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) [9] and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology [25] in 2013.
Peacock was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to medical microbiology. [26] In the same year, she was awarded membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2015. [2] , and was named in the BioBeat "50 Movers and Shakers in Biobusiness" report. [27]
She received a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) senior investigator award in 2017. [28]
Peacock was awarded the Unilever Colworth Prize in 2018 [29] in recognition of her work in microbiology. [20]
She was honoured with the MRC Millennium Medal 2021, the Medical Research Council's most prestigious prize for exceptional researchers who have made major contributions towards the MRC's mission to improve health, wealth and quality of life. [30] In 2022, she was awarded the Marjory Stephenson Prize Lecture by the Microbiology Society for her work applying the sequencing of pathogen genomes to clinical and public health microbiology including of SARS-CoV-2. [31]
In 2022, Peacock was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal Veterinary College in recognition of her achievements and contributions to the One Health agenda. [32]
In 2023, Peacock was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) by the University of Southampton, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. In the same year she was listed among the best female scientists in the World 2023 Ranking by Research.com (in the top 1000 scientists from 166,880 profiles). [33]
Peacock has given numerous named lectures, including The Tony Hart Memorial Lecture (2014) at the University of Liverpool, the Ruysch lecture (2014) at the Amsterdam Medical Centre, the McAuley Oration in International Health (2015) at the University of Otago, New Zealand, [34] the Linacre Lecture (2015) at St John's College, Cambridge, [35] the Emmanuelle Caron Memorial Lecture (2016) at Imperial College London, [36] the Jenner Lecture (2017) at St George's, University of London, the Macfarlane Burnet prize lecture (2019) at the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, [37] the Ker Memorial Lecture (2019) at the University of Edinburgh, [38] the Sir Anthony Epstein Lecture (2019) at the University of Bristol. [39] and the Grace Frankland Lecture (2022) at the University of Birmingham. [40]
In 2023, Peacock gave the WADE Lecture at the University of Southampton, [41] the George Griffin Lecture at the Association of Physicians of Great Britain & Ireland, [42] and the Hopwood Lecture (2023) at the John Innes Centre. [43]
The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust.
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
The Genome Reference Consortium (GRC) is an international collective of academic and research institutes with expertise in genome mapping, sequencing, and informatics, formed to improve the representation of reference genomes. At the time the human reference was initially described, it was clear that some regions were recalcitrant to analysis with existing technology, leaving gaps in the known sequence. The main reason for improving the reference assemblies are that they are the cornerstones upon which all whole genome studies are based.
Richard Michael Durbin is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.
The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is the British government’s major funder of clinical, public health, social care and translational research. With a budget of over £1.2 billion in 2020–21, its mission is to "improve the health and wealth of the nation through research". The NIHR was established in 2006 under the government's Best Research for Best Health strategy, and is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. As a research funder and research partner of the NHS, public health and social care, the NIHR complements the work of the Medical Research Council. NIHR focuses on translational research, clinical research and applied health and social care research.
John Andrew Todd FMedSci FRS is Professor of Precision Medicine at the University of Oxford, director of the Wellcome Center for Human Genetics and the JDRF/Wellcome Trust Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, in addition to Jeffrey Cheah Fellow in Medicine at Brasenose College. He works in collaboration with David Clayton and Linda Wicker to examine the molecular basis of type 1 diabetes.
Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is an Indian-born British chemist and Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is recognised for his contributions in the field of nucleic acids. He is scientific founder of Solexa and Cambridge Epigenetix.
Simon Tavaré is the founding Director of the Herbert and Florence Irving Institute of Cancer Dynamics at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he was Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, Professor of Cancer Research at the Department of Oncology and Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge.
Julian Parkhill is Professor of Bacterial Evolution in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He previously served as head of pathogen genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Genomics England is a British company set up and owned by the United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Care to run the 100,000 Genomes Project. The project aimed in 2014 to sequence 100,000 genomes from NHS patients with a rare disease and their families, and patients with cancer. An infectious disease strand is being led by Public Health England.
The 100,000 Genomes Project is a now-completed UK Government project managed by Genomics England that is sequencing whole genomes from National Health Service patients. The project is focusing on rare diseases, some common types of cancer, and infectious diseases. Participants give consent for their genome data to be linked to information about their medical condition and health records. The medical and genomic data is shared with researchers to improve knowledge of the causes, treatment, and care of diseases. The project has received over £300 million from public and private investment.
Julie Angela Segre is the Chief and Senior Investigator of the Translational and Functional Genomics Branch in the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Nita Gandhi Forouhi is a British physician and academic, specialising in nutrition and epidemiology. She is Professor of Population Health and Nutrition at the University of Cambridge, the programme leader of the nutritional epidemiology programme of its MRC Epidemiology Unit, and an honorary consultant public health physician with Public Health England.
Nicole Soranzo is an Italian-British senior group leader in human genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Cambridge. She is an internationally recognised Human Geneticist who has focused on the application of cutting edge genomic technologies to study the spectrum of human genetic variation associated with cardio-metabolic and immune diseases. She has led many large-scale discovery efforts including more than 1,000 novel genetic variants associated with cardio-metabolic diseases and their risk factors as well as establishing the HaemGen consortium, which is a worldwide effort to discover genetic determinants of blood cell formation and also interpretation of the downstream consequences of sequence variation through a host of integrative analyses and functional approaches.
Professor Carlos Caldas is a clinician scientist and Professor of Cancer Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He is the Chair of Cancer Medicine at the University of Cambridge, an Honorary Consultant Medical Oncologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital and Director of the Cambridge Breast Cancer Research Unit. He is a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge and an Emeritus Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Alison Helen Holmes is a British infectious diseases specialist, who is a professor at Imperial College London and the University of Liverpool. Holmes serves as Director of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance and Consultant at Hammersmith Hospital. Holmes is on the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, and she serves on a variety of World Health Organization (WHO) expert groups related to antimicrobial use, Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), infection prevention and sepsis. Her research considers how to mitigate antimicrobial resistance.
The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium was a group of academic institutions and public health agencies in the United Kingdom created in April 2020 to collect, sequence and analyse genomes of SARS-CoV-2 at scale, as part of COVID-19 pandemic response.
The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance is a computational genomics research institute in Oxfordshire.
Serena Nik-Zainal is a British-Malaysian clinician who is a consultant in clinical genetics and Cancer Research UK advanced clinician scientist at the University of Cambridge. She makes use of genomics for clinical applications. She was awarded the Crick Lecture by the Royal Society in 2021. Serena Nik-Zainal was also recognized as one of the 100 Influential Women in Oncology by OncoDaily.
Ruth Catherine Massey is a British molecular biologist who is a professor at University College Cork. Her research considers pathogens. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2023.