Are We Prepared? | Andrew Pollard | TEDxOxford

Professor Pollard obtained his medical degree at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, in 1989 and trained in Paediatrics at Birmingham Children’s Hospital specialising in Paediatric Infectious Diseases at St Mary’s Hospital, London, and at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, Vancouver, Canada. He obtained his PhD at St Mary’s Hospital in 1999 studying immunity to Neisseria meningitidis in children and proceeded to work on anti-bacterial innate immune responses in children in Canada before returning to his current position at the University of Oxford in 2001. At Oxford Children’s Hospital he led the paediatric infectious disease clinical service 2001-2021 and remains a member of the consultant team. He was Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Paediatrics 2012-2020 and Vice-Master of St Cross College, Oxford, 2017-2021.
He chairs the UK Department of Health and Social Care’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (since 2013), was a member of WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (2016-2022), and chaired the European Medicines Agency scientific advisory group on vaccines (2012–2020). He has been a member of the British Commission on Human Medicines' Clinical Trials, Biologicals and Vaccines expert advisory group since 2013. He chaired the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) meningitis guidelines development group (2006-2010), the NICE topic expert group developing quality standards for management of meningitis and meningococcal septicaemia (2011-2013). He previously chaired the scientific panel of the Spencer Dayman Meningitis Laboratories Charitable Trust (2002-2006) and was a member of the scientific committee of the Meningitis Research Foundation (2009-2014) and is currently chair of trustees of the Knoop Trust and a trustee of the Jenner Vaccine Foundation and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra.
He is director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, a research team at Oxford University with 150 research staff. His research includes the design, development and clinical evaluation of vaccines including those for typhoid, meningococcus, Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcus, plague, pertussis, influenza, rabies, coronavirus and Ebola, and leads studies using a human challenge model of paratyphoid and typhoid. He runs surveillance for invasive bacterial diseases and studies the impact of pneumococcal vaccines in children in Nepal and leads a project on burden and transmission of typhoid in Nepal, Bangladesh and Malawi, and co-leads typhoid vaccine impact studies at these sites. He was the chief investigator for the clinical trials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in 2020 in 24,000 participants in UK, South Africa and Brazil, which led to authorisation of the vaccine for use in more than 180 countries with over 3 billion doses distributed and award of the Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 2022. He has supervised 48 PhD students and his publications includes over 600 manuscripts and books on various topics in paediatrics and infectious diseases. He received the “Science Honor and Truth Award” of the Instituto de Patologia en la Altura in La Paz, Bolivia in 2002, the Bill Marshall Award of the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Disease (ESPID) in 2013, the ESPID Distinguished Award for Education and Communication in 2015, the Rosén von Rosenstein medal in 2019 awarded by the Swedish Paediatric Society and the Swedish Society of Medicine, and the James Spence Medal from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in 2022. He was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2016. He received the Oxford University Vice Chancellor’s Innovation Award in 2020 for his work on typhoid vaccines and he and the COVID19 vaccine team received a 2022 award.