ProfessorJeffery Errington

BSc MA PhD FMedSci FAA FRS

Prof Jeff Errington recently moved to Sydney to take up a prestigious and highly competitive ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. He is a  member of the Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute (Sydney ID).Errington started his career with broad interests in genetics and developmental biology but fixed on bacterial cell and molecular biology during a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. After 25 years in Oxford, ultimately as Professor Microbiology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, he was recruited to Newcastle University (UK), where he established the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology (CBCB), as founder and Director. The CBCB became a world renowned centre of excellence for application of molecular genetics and cell imaging to studies of fundamental questions about bacteria. Errington also founded two spin out companies: Prolysis Ltd (Oxford, 1998), which was later acquired by Melbourne-based Biota Holdings; and Demuris Ltd (Newcastle, 2008), which was recently acquired by US-based Odyssey Therapeutics. Both companies were predicated on the use of basic knowledge about bacteria for antibiotic drug discovery. Work in the Errington lab has been recognised by many awards and accolades, including election to both the European and American Academies of Microbiology, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, and Fellowship of the Royal Society. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He was the recipient of the Novartis Medal of the UK Biochemical Society, the Leeuwenhoek Medal of the Royal Society and the Lwoff Medal of the Federation of European Microbiology Societies. He has also given numerous named lectures at locations around the world.