Professor Sharon Peacock
Professor of Microbiology and Public Health in the Department of Medicine and Master of Churchill College at University of Cambridge

Sharon Peacock CBE FMedSci is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
She is also a Non-Executive Director on the Board of the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation, where she is the Senior Independent Director and chairs the Quality Committee.
After having trained in general internal medicine and clinical microbiology, Sharon spent much of my post-graduate career in teaching and research. Her scientific expertise includes pathogen genomics, antimicrobial resistance, and several tropical diseases – the latter arising whilst head of bacterial diseases research at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok (2003-2009).
Sharon was the founding Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), formed in April 2020 to provide SARS-CoV-2 genomes towards the UK pandemic response. Prior to this, she dedicated more than a decade to the translation of pathogen sequencing into clinical and public health microbiology to better detect and manage outbreaks, as well as using sequencing to examine the transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria between humans, livestock, and the environment.
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 the Unilever Colworth Prize in 2018 and the Marjorie Stephenson Prize in 2023 (both from the Microbiology Society) for outstanding contributions to the discipline of microbiology. Sharon was awarded a CBE for services to medical microbiology in 2015 and received the Medical Research Council Millennium Medal in 2021 for pioneering work in pathogen sequencing, leadership of COG-UK and outstanding to advancing equality, diversity and inclusion in research.
In late 2024, Sharon was selected to be among the first Honorary Fellows of HDR UK, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the Institute.