Dr Matthew Gilmour

Biography

Dr Matthew Gilmour is Group Leader in the ‘Microbes and Food Safety’ strategic programme at the Quadram Institute in Norwich, England. Matthew has a focus on translating the Institute’s key microbiology findings and genomic technologies with partners in food industry and government, and serves on multiple working groups with the Food Standards Agency.

Matthew was previously based in Canada where his group was a pioneer in using bacterial genomics to study outbreaks, including the large Canadian listeriosis outbreak in 2008 and then the Haitian cholera outbreak of 2010. With this experience in public health, from 2015 to 2020 Matthew was the Scientific Director General of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory, with significant leadership roles for pandemic preparedness and response. Matthew was also a Clinical Microbiologist and laboratory lead for Infection Prevention & Control, and he remains interested in the evolution and transmissibility of antibiotic resistant organisms.

As a culmination of these experiences, Matthew is now Director of the Food Safety Research Network and Director of the AMAST (AMR in Agrifood Systems Transdisciplinary) Network, both based at the Quadram Institute and funded by UKRI. These networks have the goal of brokering collaborative research and shared outcomes between industry, trade associations, policy makers, and academia involved in food production.