Group Leader / Professor of Microbial Genomics
In recent years, I have been at the forefront of efforts to apply next-generation sequencing to selected problems in microbiology, while also providing expert input into prokaryotic nomenclature.
I completed my undergraduate degree in medical sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and gained my medical qualification from the London Hospital Medical College In the mid-1990s, I pursued a PhD under the supervision of Gordon Dougan at Imperial College. During this time, I also captained the winning team from Imperial College in the TV quiz show University Challenge and wrote articles for the British Medical Journal, introducing the medical profession to the Internet.
In 2011, I led a crowdsourced analysis of the genome of the outbreak strain from the German E. coli O104 outbreak and benchmarked new sequencing platforms. In a range of pioneering studies, I demonstrated the use of whole-genome sequencing to track the spread of resistant bacteria and study the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. My work showed that metagenomics could diagnose bacterial infections without culture, and I pioneered its use in ancient DNA research, recovering centuries-old bacterial genomes from human remains.
From 2014 to 2020, I was the Principal Investigator on the £8 million MRC-funded project CLIMB, and now I serve as the director of its successor, CLIMB-BIG-DATA (https://www.climb.ac.uk). I am also director of the MRC-funded Microbes, Microbiomes and Bioinformatics Doctoral Training Partnership (https://www.uea.ac.uk/web/research/research-with-us/postgraduate-research/latest-phds-and-research-studentships/partnerships-in-doctoral-training/mmb).
I have developed systems to automate taxonomic naming, releasing over a million unassigned names for the microbiology research community, while also assigning over 65,000 names to previously described taxa. I have also been active in viral nomenclature, creating species epithets for the family Leviviridae and suggesting alternative names for SARS-CoV-2 variants, which led to the WHO scheme using Greek letters.
In recognition of my efforts in microbial naming, the genus Palleniella was named after me in 2022. I have authored popular science books, including “The Rough Guide to Evolution” and “The Last Days of Smallpox: Tragedy in Birmingham,” and contributed to the public understanding of science through various media appearances and collaborations.
I continue to be involved in advancing microbial genomics, metagenomics, and bioinformatics, contributing to our understanding of microbial evolution and the impact of microbes on human health and history.