Gordon Dougan

Gordon was educated in his home town of Scunthorpe in England and received his BSc and PhD from the University of Sussex, where he studied antibiotic resistance.[11] He completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Washington (Seattle) in the laboratory of Professor Stanley Falkow. He holds Masters Degrees from Trinity College Dublin[12] and Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.[13] He is a visiting professor at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine[14] and an adjunct professor at Monash[15] and Melbourne[16] universities in Australia.

After graduating from Sussex University with a PhD, he trained with Professor Stanley Falkow at the University of Washington in Seattle, a Lasker Prize winner and world leader in studies on how bacteria cause disease. After a short spell lecturing at Trinity College, Dublin.[17] Gordon then spent over 10 years in industry at The Wellcome Foundation (a UK company now part of GSK) working on vaccines and other medicines. There his group helped define the protective antigen pertactin,[1] now part of acellular whooping cough vaccines.

Gordon left industry in 1992 and moved to Imperial College London,[18] where he established The Centre for Molecular Microbiology and Infection (now MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection)[19] and secured the funding for a new building (The Flowers Building) adjacent to the British Science Museum. He spent 10 years at Imperial, building a world leading centre for teaching and research and discovered key mucosal adjuvants.[20]

In 2004, he became Head of Pathogen Research at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, a world leading centre for genomic research. Over the next decade he built a department that led the world in research on pathogen genomics and disease tracking. His article on cholera genomics, published in the journal Nature,[21] redefined our understanding of how the disease spreads around the world. His team also highlighted the key role of antibiotic resistance in shaping pathogen evolution, tracking epidemic clades such as H58 in typhoid [22] and ST313 in invasive non-typhoidal salmonellosis[23] in Africa. His teams also contributed to the discovery of the role of the gene IFITM3 in controlling influenza susceptibility.[24]

Gordon has worked extensively with WHO. He chaired the Novartis Vaccine SAB for many years. He served on the Board of Directors of the Hilleman Laboratories[25] where he helped bring in the stabilised oral cholera (Hikojima/Hillcol) vaccine now being developed in India. Gordon has founded companies including Microbiotica[26] working on novel approaches to tackling infections via bacteriotherapies.

Gordon is currently a Professor in the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease (CITIID), Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge and an advisor to Wellcome.

Gordon was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2011, a Fellow of The American Society for Microbiology in 2010, and a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2012. He is the only person to have won the Fleming Lectureship, The Colworth Lectureship and the Marjory Stephenson Lectureship prizes awarded by the Microbiology Society.

He has been a lifelong supporter of Scunthorpe United and is an experienced beekeeper.