Mark Pallen
Mark J. Pallen is a research leader at the Quadram Institute and Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of East Anglia. In recent years, he has been at the forefront of efforts to apply next-generation sequencing to problems in microbiology and ancient DNA research. Education Pallen was educated at Wallington High School. He completed an undergraduate degree in medical sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and gained his medical qualification from the London Hospital Medical College. During the early 1990s, he gained an MD while working at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College. In the mid-1990s, he worked for a PhD under the supervision of Gordon Dougan at Imperial College. During this time, he captained the winning team from Imperial College in the TV quiz show University Challenge, while also writing a series of articles for the British Medical Journal, introducing the medical profession to the Internet. Microbial genomics, metagenomics and bioinformatics In 2011, Pallen led a crowdsourced analysis of the genome of the outbreak strain from the 2011 German E. coli O104:H4 outbreak, which had been genome-sequenced on the Ion Torrent platform by the BGI. Around the same time, he also led a project in which an isolate from the