Kenny Baillie

Professor of Experimental Medicine, University of Edinburgh at University of Edinburgh

Kenny Baillie is Professor of Experimental Medicine, University of Edinburgh. He completed basic training in medicine in Glasgow, and in anesthesia in Edinburgh. He was awarded a Wellcome-Beit Prize Intermediate Clinical Fellowship in 2013. He led a global consensus on harmonisation of research studies in outbreaks for the International Severe Acute Respiratory Infection Consortium (ISARIC), and worked with WHO on H1N1 influenza, MERS, and Ebola. After completing clinical training in 2014 he worked as a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, before returning to the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh to establish a research program in translational applications of genomics in critical care medicine. He works as a consultant in the intensive care unit at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. During the Covid outbreak in 2020-21, he led the UK-wide GenOMICC and ISARIC4C studies, and contributed to the design and delivery of the RECOVERY trial. He discovered new biological mechanisms underlying critical illness in Covid, and contributed to the discovery of effective drug treatments to reduce mortality. He leads a research programme in translational genomics - using genetic signals from critically ill patients to identify both the targets for drug therapy, and the groups of patients likely to benefit most from any treatment, and testing those therapeutic ideas in highly-efficient model systems. Kenny is lead of the Outbreak Data Analysis Platform.