19/04/2024
The politics of time with Carolyn Smith
The President, Professor Jane Clarke, said, "I am delighted to announce that the Governing Body of Wolfson College has elected Professor Gordon Dougan as an Honorary Fellow."
Gordon has been a Fellow of Wolfson College since 2008. He is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, and has spent his career leading research into vaccines, pathogen genomics and disease tracking. His research work has helped to redefine our understanding of how infections spread around the world, a subject of direct relevance to the current Covid-19 epidemic.
Gordon was born in Scunthorpe in the north of England. After obtaining a PhD from Sussex University he trained with Professor Stanley Falkow in Seattle, a Lasker Prize winner and world leader in studies on how bacteria cause disease. The team was one of the first in the world to apply gene cloning to vaccine development. He continued this work as a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, helping to define vaccine antigens for animal diseases.
His work has focused particularly on making quality, low-cost vaccines that can be used by those who normally cannot afford them. There are many vaccines and vaccine initiatives that would not have been developed without his strategic vision. His research work has helped to redefine our understanding of how infections spread around the world, a subject of direct relevance to the current COVID-19 epidemic.
During the coronavirus pandemic he helped set up testing for COVID-19 in the hospital healthcare workers, established safe containment facilities for handling the SARS-CoV-2 virus and worked on the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium virus sequencing project, tracking virus movement into and across the UK. He recently gave a lecture Working in Research Through the COVID-19 Crisis to the Wolfson College Science Society, a recording of which can been viewed in our Media Collection.
Gordon was recently awarded the Albert B Sabin Gold Medal by the Albert B Sabin Institute in Washington. He is the first UK national to win the award, which is named after the the inventor of the oral polio vaccine. The medal is the highest international award for contributions to vaccinology and disease control and it is given to a distinguished member of the public health community who has made extraordinary contributions in the field of vaccinology or a complementary field.
The Medal was awarded to Gordon for his leadership across the full spectrum of vaccines and vaccinology.
Many congratulations to Gordon on his Honorary Fellowship.
