Genetics Society Medal 2021 – Prof David Sherratt

Professor David Sherratt is Iveagh Professor of Microbiology at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford.

In 1969 he completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, at the then newly formed department of Molecular Biology.  From Edinburgh David went on to become a post-doctoral Fellow at the University of California for two years, working on the newly characterised plasmid ColE1, in Don Helinski’s lab.  David returned to the UK in 1971 to become a lecturer at the University of Sussex. In 1980 he would go on to become Chair of Genetics at Glasgow University.  Then moving to Oxford in 1994 to take up post as Iveagh Chair of Microbiology, it was at this time David also served as president of the Genetics Society.

David considers himself a molecular detective who uses interdisciplinary approaches to understand how the bacterial chromosome is organized, replicated, repaired, unlinked and segregated within a living cell.  Studying how these processes are interwoven with cell physiology in steady state growth and under ‘perturbed’ conditions.

You can read more about Professor Sherratt’s academic biography and achievements in his article, The journey of a molecular detective, published in Heredity in 2019 as part of the Genetics Society’s centenary celebrations.