Sharon Peacock

Peacock studied medicine at Southampton University, graduating in 1988. After this, she conducted four years of postgraduate training in London, Brighton, and Oxford, during which she obtained Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom (MRCP).[1] She was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship in microbiology in 1995, and subsequent training in clinical microbiology led to Peacock obtaining membership of the Royal College of Pathologists in 1997. During this Fellowship, Peacock gained a PhD for her work on host-cell interactions of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. She completed a BA in History from the Open University in 1995.

Peacock's work is particularly focused upon developing diagnostic and public health innovations from genome sequencing technologies.[2]

From 1998, Peacock worked as senior lecturer in clinical microbiology at the University of Oxford. In 2002 she went to Thailand on a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award, and remained there until 2009. During this time, she began collaboration with teams at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and became head of bacterial diseases research at the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme in Bangkok.[3]

On returning to the UK, Peacock became Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, heading the Peacock Lab.[4] 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.[3] Peacock has published around 150 papers on these topics.[5]

Peacock led a working group for the Department of Health's 100,000 genome project and in 2017 contributed to the UK Chief Medical Officer's annual report on antimicrobial resistance.[6][7]

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.[6]

Large-scale research conducted by Peacock involved studies of MRSA, and in 2017 her study into the superbug was published in Science Translational Medicine.[8][9] She continues to research pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and multidrug resistant bacilli, and to conduct studies aimed at identifying reservoirs of antimicrobial resistance.[2][10][11][12]

In 2019, she was appointed Director of the National Infection Service,[13] a department of Public Health England (PHE) which operates laboratories working on bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance.[14] By 2020 Peacock was seconded to the position of Director of Science at PHE, and was a member of PHE's management committee.[15] She is the Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), established in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to collaborate on whole genome sequencing of the virus.[16][17]

Peacock receives funding from the Medical Research Council, the Department of Health, Wellcome Trust, and from the Department of Biotechnology.[10]

Professor Peacock was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences [2] and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology [18] in 2013.

Peacock was appointed a CBE in 2015 for services to medical microbiology.[19] In the same year, she was named in the BioBeat 50 Movers and Shakers in Biobusiness report. [20] She received a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator Award in 2017. [21]

Peacock was awarded the Unilever Colworth Prize in 2018 [22] in recognition of her work in microbiology. [8]

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,[23] the Linacre Lecture (2015) at St John’s College Cambridge,[24] the Emmanuelle Caron Memorial Lecture (2016) at Imperial College,[25] the Jenner Lecture (2017) at St Georges Hospital Medical School, the Macfarlane Burnet prize lecture (2019) at the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases,[26] the Ker Memorial Lecture (2019) at the Edinburgh University,[27] and the Sir Anthony Epstein Lecture (2019) at Bristol University.[28]