John Charles Sherris

John Charles Sherris (March 8, 1921 – May 2, 2021) was an English-American medical doctor, pathologist, and bacteriologist. He was the president of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in 1983.

Biography Sherris grew up near London. In Kensington in 1944 he married Elizabeth L. McArthur. At the University of London, Sherris graduated in 1944 with an MB BS, in 1948 with a higher Doctor of Medicine degree, and in 1950 with a D.Sc. in pathology, specializing in bacteriology. In the late 1940s, he began antibiotic research with Mary Ethel Florey, a member of the Oxford team that developed penicillin for clinical use. At the beginning of his career, he received hospital appointments at London's King Edward VII's Hospital and Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. In 1953 he became a faculty member in the bacteriology department of the University of Manchester. In 1959 he moved with his family to Seattle to become an associate professor in the University of Washington's department of bacteriology. He was promoted to full professor in 1963, retaining that position until he retired as professor emeritus. From 1959 to 1970 he directed the University of Washington's Clinical Microbiology Laboratories. Beginning in 1970 he chaired the University of Washington's department of microbiology and immunology for about a decade. William M. M. Kirby, and Marvin Turck, developed and validated a method called "disk diffusion susceptibility testing". which, by the end of the year 2012, had been cited over 6,000 times.

In addition to working on antibiotic sensitivity testing, Sherris did research on "bacterial identification, automation in clinical microbiology, and the epidemiology and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance." The 2021 8th edition has 992 pages.

Sherris served on the editorial boards of The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and was the editor-in-chief of the ASM Cumitech series of clinical microbiology techniques.

In 1975 the Karolinska Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate in medicine. In 1978 he received the Becton Dickinson Award in Clinical Microbiology. He received in 1988 the bioMérieux Sonnenwirth Award for Leadership in Clinical Microbiology and in 2004 the ABMM/ABMLI Professional Recognition Award.

John Sherris's wife Elizabeth died in 2014 after 70 years of marriage. They had a son, Peter M., born in 1947, and a daughter, Jacqueline R., born in 1951. Upon his death, John Sherris was survived by his two children, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Jacqueline R. Sherris became an affiliate faculty member in the School of Public Health of the University of Washington.

Selected publications