Sharon Peacock CBE FMedSci is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. She is also Executive Director and Chair of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), and is on secondment to Public Health England (PHE) as Director of Science (Pathogen Genomics).
She is known for her work on public health microbiology and developing diagnostic health innovations from genome sequencing technologies. Her research specialities include work on MRSA and the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes the tropical infection melioidosis.
Sharon studied medicine at Southampton University. After graduating in 1988, she obtained MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians) during four years of post-graduate training in general internal medicine in Brighton, Oxford and London. Clinical microbiology training at Oxford University followed, leading to MRCPath and completion of training in clinical microbiology and virology in 1997. She was awarded a PhD for work on the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus in 2003. Sharon also obtained a BA in History through the Open University. She has supervised 21 PhD students to completion, published around 450 publications including 21 book chapters, and is active in teaching and scientific peer review.
Sharon is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and an elected Member of EMBO. She was awarded a CBE for services to medical microbiology in 2015, and the Unilever Colworth Prize for outstanding contribution to translational microbiology in 2018.