Honorary Fellow of St John’s named as next Master of Churchill College
Scientist and former Fellow founded world-leading consortium that helped in fight against Covid-19
Professor Sharon Peacock CBE FMedSci, Honorary Fellow of St John’s, will be the eighth Master of Churchill College.
The announcement follows Churchill’s selection process that ran this year and her election has now been approved by King Charles III. She will be formally admitted as Master in October 2024, succeeding Professor Dame Athene Donald, whose 10-year term ends in September.
Professor Peacock is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Her research has focused on translating pathogen sequencing into mainstream practice to improve patient care and public health. In April 2020 she was founding director of the COG-UK, the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, where she led one of the most successful genomic sequencing operations in the world for SARS-CoV-2 genomes, the cause of Covid-19.
She has also used sequencing to track the spread of antimicrobial resistant organisms between humans, animals and the environment and is an authority on a range of tropical infectious diseases.
Professor Peacock left school at 16 to work in a shop. After getting a job in a dental surgery, she trained as a dental nurse and later as a state-registered nurse while studying for her GCSEs at night school. She worked as a qualified nurse while taking her A-Levels at a technical college and successfully applied to Southampton University to study medicine. Professor Peacock initially pursued postgraduate training as a physician before specialising in clinical microbiology.
She has wide-ranging interests and was awarded a BA in History by the Open University in 1995, studied alongside higher medical training.
A Fellow of St John’s College from 2013-2015, Professor Peacock was elected as an Honorary Fellow in 2022. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to medical microbiology in 2015.
She is also a Non-Executive Director on the Board of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Published: 11/10/2023