Paul M. Sharp

Last updated

Paul Sharp
FRS FRSE MRIA
Born
Paul Martin Sharp

(1957-09-12) 12 September 1957 (age 68) [1]
Alma mater University of Edinburgh (BSc, PhD)
Known for
Awards EMBO Member (1992) [5]
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Quantitative genetics of Drosophila melanogaster - variation in male mating ability  (1982)
Doctoral advisor Alan Robertson [8]
Doctoral students Kenneth H. Wolfe [9] [10]
Other notable students Desmond G. Higgins (postdoc) [11]
Website www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/paul-sharp(ed91461c-d4f2-497d-8621-2ec9be212726).html

Paul Martin Sharp (born 1957) [1] is a British bioinformatician who is a professor of genetics at the University of Edinburgh, where he holds the Alan Robertson chair of genetics in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology. [12] [13] [14] [15]

Contents

Education

Sharp was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 [1] [16] followed by a PhD in 1982 for research using quantitative genetics on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster supervised by Alan Robertson. [12] [8]

Career and research

Sharp has held academic posts at Trinity College, Dublin from 1982 to 1993, [7] the University of Nottingham from 1993 to 2007 [7] and was appointed Professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2007. [7]

Sharp's research investigates the evolutionary origin of bacteria and viruses. [17] [18] [19] He has carried out important work into the origin of HIV and its transmission from chimpanzees to humans. He also discovered that the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium , originated in gorillas. [17] He was one of the first researchers to use DNA sequence databases to gain insight into evolutionary processes. His work amplifying DNA from chimpanzee faecal samples showed that HIV type 1 was transmitted to humans from a specific chimp population in West Africa in the early 20th century. Paul went on to examine his collection of ape faecal samples for plasmodium parasites, finding a likely candidate for the form that causes malaria in humans. [17] [20]

In the eighties, Sharp collaborated with Desmond G. Higgins during the creation of CLUSTAL, [2] [3] a suite of multiple sequence alignment programs that have become widely used and highly influential. [21] His research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). [22] His former doctoral students include Kenneth H. Wolfe.

Awards and honours

Sharp was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 1992, [5] and was President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution [ when? ]. He was elected member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1993, [16] a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2010 [23] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. [17]

In 2024 Sharp was awarded The Darwin Medal for his work addressing the origins and evolution of HIV and the malaria parasite Plasmodium. [24]

Personal life

Sharps's entry in Who's Who lists his recreations as hill walking, pteridology and, since 1967, supporting Nottingham Forest Football Club. [1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Anon (2016). "Sharp, Prof. Paul Martin" . Who's Who (online Oxford University Press  ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.271679.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. 1 2 Higgins, Desmond G.; Sharp, Paul M. (1988). "CLUSTAL: a package for performing multiple sequence alignment on a microcomputer". Gene. 73 (1): 237–244. doi:10.1016/0378-1119(88)90330-7. PMID   3243435.
  3. 1 2 Higgins, Desmond G.; Sharp, Paul M. (1989). "Fast and sensitive multiple sequence alignments on a microcomputer". Bioinformatics. 5 (2): 151–153. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/5.2.151. PMID   2720464.
  4. 1 2 Sharp, Paul M.; Li, Wen-Hsiung (1987). "The codon adaptation index-a measure of directional synonymous codon usage bias, and its potential applications". Nucleic Acids Research. 15 (3): 1281–1295. doi:10.1093/nar/15.3.1281. PMC   340524 . PMID   3547335.
  5. 1 2 "Paul M. Sharp University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom". Hedelberg: EMBO. Archived from the original on 19 January 2016.
  6. ↑ Paul M. Sharp publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  7. 1 2 3 4 Paul Sharp's ORCID   0000-0001-9771-543X
  8. 1 2 Sharp, Paul Martin (1982). Quantitative genetics of Drosophila melanogaster: variation in male mating ability (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/14397. OCLC   606022632. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.330579. Open Access logo PLoS transparent.svg
  9. ↑ Paul M. Sharp at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  10. ↑ Wolfe, Kenneth H. (1990). Rates of nucleotide substitution in higher plants and mammals (PhD thesis). Trinity College, Dublin. OCLC   842511087.
  11. ↑ "Paul M. Sharp: Computational Biology Tree". academictree.org.
  12. 1 2 "Professor Paul M. Sharp, FRS, FRSE, MRIA: Alan Robertson Chair of Genetics". Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on 12 April 2016.
  13. ↑ Sharp, P. M.; Hahn, B. H. (2011). "Origins of HIV and the AIDS Pandemic". Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine. 1 (1) a006841. doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a006841. PMC   3234451 . PMID   22229120.
  14. ↑ "Staff profiles: Institute of Evolutionary Biology". Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on 17 September 2015.
  15. ↑ Paul M. Sharp publications from Europe PubMed Central
  16. 1 2 "Paul Martin Sharp BSc, PhD (Edin 1979, 1982). FRS, FRSE". Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. 19 October 2015. Archived from the original on 13 April 2016.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Anon (2013). "Professor Paul Sharp FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." -- "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  18. ↑ Paul M. Sharp publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  19. ↑ Hahn, Beatrice H.; Shaw, George M.; Cock, Kevin M. De; Sharp, Paul M. (2000). "AIDS as a Zoonosis: Scientific and Public Health Implications". Science . 287 (5453): 607–614. Bibcode:2000Sci...287..607H. doi:10.1126/science.287.5453.607. PMID   10649986.
  20. ↑ Gao, Feng; Bailes, Elizabeth; Robertson, David L.; Chen, Yalu; Rodenburg, Cynthia M.; Michael, Scott F.; Cummins, Larry B.; Arthur, Larry O.; Peeters, Martine; Shaw, George M.; Sharp, Paul M.; Hahn, Beatrice H. (1999). "Origin of HIV-1 in the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes troglodytes". Nature. 397 (6718): 436–441. Bibcode:1999Natur.397..436G. doi: 10.1038/17130 . PMID   9989410. S2CID   4432185.
  21. ↑ Van Noorden, R.; Maher, B.; Nuzzo, R. (2014). "The top 100 papers: Nature explores the most-cited research of all time". Nature . 514 (7524): 550–3. doi: 10.1038/514550a . PMID   25355343.
  22. ↑ "UK Government grants awarded to Paul M. Sharp". Swindon: Research Councils UK. Archived from the original on 12 April 2016.
  23. ↑ "Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows as of 2016-05-13" (PDF). Edinburgh: Royal Society of Edinburgh. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 March 2016.
  24. ↑ "Darwin Medal | Royal Society". royalsociety.org. 29 November 2024. Retrieved 11 December 2024.
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