Gordon Dougan

Professor Gordon Dougan is Head of Pathogen Research and a member of the Board of Management at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. During his career, Dougan has pioneered work on enteric diseases and been heavily involved in the movement to improve vaccine usage in developing countries. In this regard he was recently voted as one of the top ten most influential people in the vaccine world by people working in the area.

He was educated in his home town of Scunthorpe in England, attending Henderson Avenue Junior School, Scunthorpe Grammar School and John Leggott Sixth Form College. He graduated with a degree in Biochemistry and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex. Gordon completed postdoctoral research at the University of Washington (Seattle) in the laboratory of Professor Stanley Falkow.

Dougan's research team studies enteric pathogens with a strong emphasis on basic pathogenic mechanisms and immunology. He has a particular interest in using genomics to study host/pathogens interactions, in particular using Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, the cause of typhoid. He has extensive experience working both in industry and in academia. Before moving to the WTSI he was the Director of the Centre for Molecular Microbiology and Infection at the Imperial College London and a Professor of Physiological Biochemistry. There he was responsible for securing multimillion-pound funding for a new building in Kensington and providing infrastructure for the science.

Throughout his career Dougan has served as a referee, advisor and consultant for numerous institutions, universities, boards, committees and other organizations. He was a trustee of the International Vaccine Institute in Korea and has worked with other global agencies including the World Health Organisation and the Global Alliance for Vaccine and Innovations (now GAVI Alliance). He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2002, is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.

Dougan was a lecturer in the Moyne Institute in Trinity College, Dublin and then worked for over ten years in industry developing vaccines and novel drugs at the Wellcome Foundation (now GSK). He has participated in early and late clinical studies on several vaccines and is an expert in vaccinology/pathogenic mechanisms, specialising on the immunology of mucosal vaccines and molecular basis of infection. He has been Chair of the Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics Scientific Advisory Board and has spun out a number of companies. He has published over 400 research papers, edited several books and has sat on the editorial boards of a number of prestigious journals.

Dougan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. His nomination reads:

He was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2011.

He has been a lifelong supporter of Scunthorpe United and is a keen beekeeper.