Prof. Peter Ghazal OBE FMedSciNon-Executive Director
Professor Peter Ghazal OBE FMedSci holds the Sêr Cymru II Chair of Systems Medicine at Cardiff Medical School, Systems Immunity Research Institute and Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol Medical School. He was previously the founding Director of the Scottish Centre for Genomic Technology and Informatics and former Head of the Division of Pathway Medicine, Associate Director of Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology at Edinburgh University. Prior to joining the Edinburgh Medical School faculty, he was Associate Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, a Scholar of the American Leukemia Society and Fellow of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
He is currently leading Project Sepsis sponsored by the Welsh Government and EU – a precision medicine project using systems approaches to decode and rapidly detect the condition of sepsis, the leading pathway to death from infection (including COVID19). His research interests are in the field of host genomics of early-life infection, identifying novel immune and metabolic links that govern the balance between harmful and beneficial systemic host responses to infection. These studies are specifically aimed at the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, including predictive modelling of host-protection against infection. He has previously 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 better understand neonatal sepsis and deciphering the molecular systems immunology of childhood pneumonia and vaccine responses. His career spans 15 years in the USA (first as a Fellow at NIH in Bethesda MD and subsequently as Faculty member at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla CA and for the last 22 years in the UK; he has published over 200 papers and 9 patents. He is founder of three start-up companies at the interface of engineering and biology.
Professor Ghazal has served as member or chair of a number of national and international advisory boards, think tanks, and review committees within both academia, industry, charitable and government bodies in the UK, EU, USA and Canada, including Chair of the Virus Scientific Advisory Board for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the NIH NIAID Human Immunology Project Consortium in the USA. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. In 2023, Peter has been awarded an OBE for ‘services to systems immunology’.
