Paul M. Sharp

Education

Sharp was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979[1][18] followed by a PhD in 1982 for research using quantitative genetics on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster supervised by Alan Robertson.[14][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.[12][19][20] 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.[12] 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.[12][21]

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.[22] His research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).[23] 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. He was elected member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1993,[18] a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2010[13] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013.[12]

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. Anon (2016). "Sharp, Prof. Paul Martin". Who's Who (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.271679. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
  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. 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. 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. "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
  7. Paul Sharp's ORCID 0000-0001-9771-543X
  8. 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.
  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. 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.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  13. "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.
  14. "Professor Paul M. Sharp, FRS, FRSE, MRIA: Alan Robertson Chair of Genetics". Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on 12 April 2016.
  15. 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.
  16. "Staff profiles: Institute of Evolutionary Biology". Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on 17 September 2015.
  17. Paul M. Sharp publications from Europe PubMed Central
  18. "Paul Martin Sharp BSc, PhD (Edin 1979, 1982). FRS, FRSE". Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. Archived from the original on 13 April 2016.
  19. Paul M. Sharp publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  20. 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. doi:10.1126/science.287.5453.607. PMID 10649986.
  21. 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. doi:10.1038/17130. PMID 9989410.
  22. 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.
  23. "UK Government grants awarded to Paul M. Sharp". Swindon: Research Councils UK. Archived from the original on 12 April 2016.
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