Peter Ghazal
Professor Peter Ghazal short biog
Peter Ghazal is Professor of Molecular Genetics and Biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is the founding Head of the Division of Pathway Medicine, Associate Director of Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology in Edinburgh (SynthSys) and Honorary Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
He received a BSc from the University of Wales in Biochemistry and Marine Sciences in 1982 and a PhD in in Genetics from the University of Edinburgh in 1985. Upon completing his post-doctoral training fellowship at the National Institutes of Health he joined the Department of Immunology at the Scripps Research Institute and was promoted in 1995 to Associate Professor and was a Scholar of the American Leukemia Society. In 2001 he returned to Edinburgh as founding director of the Scottish Centre for Genomic Technology and Informatics and also a personal Chair in the School of Medicine. His research interests are in the field of transcriptional regulation of DNA viruses and host genomics of early-life infection; including elucidating immune (interferon) networks of systemic host response to infection and understanding the link between lipid/sterol metabolism and host protection pathways in macrophages. These studies are aimed at the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, including predictive modelling of host-defence against infection. He has been actively involved in a range of collaborative clinical investigations conducted in the UK and in Africa with the MRC Gambia unit using a systems biology approach to understand neonatal sepsis, and deciphering the molecular systems immunology of childhood pneumonia and vaccine responses.
Professor Ghazal has been a recipient of a number of awards for his work and has served as a member of a number of advisory boards, think tanks, and review committees within both academia, industry, charitable and government bodies in the UK, EU, USA and Canada, and is presently Chair of the Virus Scientific Advisory Board for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the NIH Human Immunology Project Consortium in the USA.
Abstracts this author is presenting: