Sharon Peacock

Having failed her eleven-plus (11+) exam, Peacock left school aged 16 to work in a corner shop. She then trained as a dental nurse, before entering training as a state registered nurse. On completing nursing training, she specialised in end-of-life care and studied part-time for A-levels. She enrolled to study medicine at the University of Southampton in 1983, and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine (BM) degree in 1988. Following this, she did four years of postgraduate training in London, Brighton and Oxford, during which she obtained Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians (MRCP). She completed the Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1994.

Peacock was awarded a Wellcome Trust research training fellowship in microbiology in 1995, supporting a PhD conducted at the University of Oxford and Trinity College Dublin and awarded in 2003 by the Open University for her work on fibronectin-binding proteins in the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. Training in clinical microbiology led to membership of the Royal College of Pathologists (MRCPath) in 1997. She was awarded a BA in History by the Open University in 1995, studied alongside higher medical training. Peacock completed the Non-Executive Director diploma with the Financial Times in 2017.

In 2023, Peacock was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) by the University of Southampton.

Peacock's work is particularly focused upon developing diagnostic and public health innovations from genome sequencing technologies.

From 1998, Peacock worked as senior lecturer in clinical microbiology at the University of Oxford. In 2002 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award, and moved to the Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, Thailand where she was head of bacterial diseases research for seven years. During this time, she began collaboration with teams at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute on whole genome sequencing of a range of pathogens.

On returning to the UK in 2009, Peacock became Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, heading the Peacock Lab. She also took up consultant positions with the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and the Health Protection Agency, a public body advising on protecting public health. She maintained a research programme in Thailand, working on the molecular epidemiology of Leptospira, infection mechanisms of Burkholderia pseudomallei and melioidosis. Peacock has published around 150 papers on these topics. She was a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 2013 to 2015 and was elected as an Honorary Fellow in 2022.

Peacock led a working group for the Department of Health's 100,000 Genomes Project and, in 2017, contributed to the UK Chief Medical Officer's annual report on antimicrobial resistance.

In 2015, Peacock was appointed the founding director of the Bloomsbury Research Institute, a £50 million research facility intended to investigate new treatments, vaccines, and methods of diagnosing, preventing and controlling diseases.

In 2019, Peacock returned to the University of Cambridge as Professor of Public Health and Microbiology. In the same year, she took up a secondment as Director of the National Infection Service, a department of Public Health England (PHE) which operates laboratories working on bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. By 2020, Peacock was seconded to the position of Director of Science at PHE, and was a member of PHE's management committee. She was the founding director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), established in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to collaborate on whole genome sequencing of the virus.

Peacock has been a non-executive director on the board of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust since 2015.

Her appointment as the 8th Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, with effect from October 2024, was announced in October 2023.