Geoffrey Lilley Smith

Geoffrey Lilley Smith (born 1955) and a principal research fellow of the Wellcome Trust. Before that, he was head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London.

Education Smith was educated at the Bootham School for research completed at the National Institute for Medical Research. Smith developed and pioneered the use of genetically engineered live vaccines. Between 1985 and 1989 he lectured at the University of Cambridge. During 2002 Smith sequenced a strain of Camelpox showing how close it was to human Smallpox.

Prior to 2002, he was based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford. Between 1988 and 1992 his work was funded by the Jenner Fellowship from The Lister Institute; he became a governor of the Institute in 2003.

Smith was editor-in-chief of the Journal of General Virology In 2009 Smith was elected as one of the founding members of the new European Academy of Microbiology and the following year was elected as a corresponding member of the . Until 2011 he was the head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London. As of 2011 Smith became president of the International Union of Microbiological Societies.

Publications

Awards and honours In 2002, Smith was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2005 was awarded the Feldburg Foundation Prize for his work on poxviruses. Since 2010, he is a founding member of the European Academy of Microbiology. In 2011 he was elected as a fellow of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In June 2012 Smith was awarded the 2012 GlaxoSmithKline International Member of the Year Award by the American Society for Microbiology.

Personal life His maternal grandfather was Ralph Lilley Turner, director of the School of Oriental Studies and a philologist of Indian languages.