Geoffrey Smith | |
---|---|
Born | [1] | 23 July 1955
Scientific career | |
Thesis | Replication of the influenze virus genome (1981) |
Website | www |
Geoffrey Lilley Smith (born 1955)[1] FRS FMedSci FRSB[2][3] is a British virologist and medical research authority in the area of Vaccinia virus and the family of Poxviruses.[4] Since 1 October 2011 he is head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge[3][5] and a principal research fellow of the Wellcome Trust.[6] Before that, he was head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London.[7][8]
Smith was educated at the Bootham School[1] in York and completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Leeds in 1977. In 1981 he was awarded a PhD in Virology[9] for research completed at the National Institute for Medical Research.[10][11][12][13]
Between 1981 and 1984, while he was working in the United States under the National Institutes of Health,[14] Smith developed and pioneered the use of genetically engineered live vaccines.[15] Between 1985 and 1989 he lectured at the University of Cambridge.[11] During 2002 Smith sequenced a strain of Camelpox showing how close it was to human Smallpox.[16]
Prior to 2002, he was based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford.[4][11][17] Between 1988 and 1992 his work was funded by the Jenner Fellowship from The Lister Institute;[18] he became a governor of the Institute in 2003.[19][20]
Smith was editor-in-chief of the Journal of General Virology[20] up until 2008 and chairs the World Health Organization's Advisory Committee on Variola Virus Research.[21][22][23] In 2009 Smith was elected as one of the founding members of the new European Academy of Microbiology and the following year was elected as a corresponding member of the Gesellschaft für Virologie.[24] Until 2011 he was the head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London.[2][25] As of 2011 Smith became president of the International Union of Microbiological Societies.[26][10]
Andrew H. Wyllie had been the previous holder of the head of the Department of Pathology at Cambridge until retirement in September 2011.[27]
In 2002, Smith was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society[4][28] and in 2005 was awarded the Feldburg Foundation Prize for his work on poxviruses.[29] Since 2010, he is a founding member of the European Academy of Microbiology.[30] In 2011 he was elected as a fellow of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.[31][32] In June 2012 Smith was awarded the 2012 GlaxoSmithKline International Member of the Year Award by the American Society for Microbiology.[13]
His maternal grandfather was Ralph Lilley Turner,[citation needed] director of the School of Oriental Studies and a philologist of Indian languages.