Geoffrey L. Smith

Who is Geoffrey L. Smith?

Geoffrey Lilley Smith FRS FMedSci FIBiol is a British virologist and medical research authority in the area of Vaccinia virus and the family of Poxviruses. Since 1 October 2011 he is Head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge and a Principal Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust. Before that, he was Head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London.

Smith completed his bachelors degree at the University of Leeds in 1977 and in 1981 gained a PhD in Virology whilst in London at the National Institute for Medical Research. Between 1981–1984, while he was working in the United States under the National Institutes of Health, Smith developed and pioneered the use of genetically engineered live vaccines. Between 1985–1989 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 1988–1992 his work was funded by the Jenner Fellowship from The Lister Institute; he became a governor of the Institute in 2003. In 1992 the Society for General Microbiology awarded Smith their Fleming Award for outstanding work by a young microbiologist. In 2002, Smith was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2003, he was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2005 was awarded the Feldburg Foundation Prize for his work on poxviruses. In June 2012 Smith was awarded the 2012 GlaxoSmithKline International Member of the Year Award by the American Society for Microbiology.