Sharon Peacock

She has held senior positions at Public Health England since 2019, and in 2020 helped to establish and then lead the COG-UK consortium, which provides genomic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In 2019, her position at Cambridge changed to Professor of Public Health and Microbiology. Towards the end of that year she was appointed Director of the National Infection Service, a department of Public Health England (PHE) which operates laboratories working on bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. By 2020 Peacock was seconded to the position of Director of Science at PHE, and was a member of PHE's management committee. She is the Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), established in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to collaborate on whole genome sequencing of the virus.

Peacock was awarded the Unilever Colworth Prize in 2018 in recognition of her work in microbiology.

Peacock led a working group for the Department of Health's 100,000 genome project and in 2017 contributed to the UK Chief Medical Officer's annual report on antimicrobial resistance.

Large-scale research conducted by Peacock involved studies of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and in 2017 her study into the superbug was published in Science Translational Medicine. She continues to research pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and multidrug resistant bacilli, and to conduct studies aimed at identifying reservoirs of antimicrobial resistance.

In 2015, Peacock was appointed the founding director of the Bloomsbury Research Institute, a £50 million research facility intended to investigate new treatments, vaccines, and methods of diagnosing, preventing, and controlling diseases.

Peacock was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to medical microbiology. In the same year, she was named in the BioBeat 50 Movers and Shakers in Biobusiness report. She received a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) senior investigator award in 2017.

She was awarded membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2015. In 2022 she was awarded the Marjory Stephenson Prize Lecture by the Microbiology Society for her work applying the sequencing of pathogen genomes to clinical and public health microbiology including of SARS-CoV-2.

Peacock has given numerous named lectures, including The Tony Hart Memorial Lecture (2014) at the University of Liverpool, the Ruysch lecture (2014) at the Amsterdam Medical Centre, the McAuley Oration in International Health (2015) at the University of Otago, New Zealand, the Linacre Lecture (2015) at St John's College, Cambridge, the Emmanuelle Caron Memorial Lecture (2016) at Imperial College London, the Jenner Lecture (2017) at St George's, University of London, the Macfarlane Burnet prize lecture (2019) at the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, the Ker Memorial Lecture (2019) at the University of Edinburgh, and the Sir Anthony Epstein Lecture (2019) at the University of Bristol.

Peacock was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2013.

From 1998, Peacock worked as senior lecturer in clinical microbiology at the University of Oxford. In 2002 she went to Thailand on a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award, and remained there until 2009. During this time, she began collaboration with teams at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and became head of bacterial diseases research at the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme in Bangkok.

Having failed her eleven-plus (11+) exam, Peacock left school aged 16 to work in a shop. She then became a dental nurse, and entered formal training as a nurse. She eventually enrolled at the University of Southampton, and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine (BM) degree in 1988. Following this, she did four years of postgraduate training in London, Brighton, and Oxford, during which she obtained Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians (MRCP). She was awarded a Wellcome Trust research training fellowship in microbiology in 1995, and subsequent training in clinical microbiology led to Peacock obtaining membership of the Royal College of Pathologists (MRCPath) in 1997. During this Fellowship, Peacock was awarded a PhD in 2003 from the Open University for her work on fibronectin-binding proteins in the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus.

Sharon Jayne Peacock CBE FMedSci MRCP (born 24 March 1959) is a British microbiologist who is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. She is known for her work on the use of microbial whole genome sequencing in diagnostic and public health microbiology, particularly on the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei and on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).