“Using genomics to understand pneumococcal evolution and inform disease prevention”

Venue: The Murray Room CTIR 2.84 

Host: Dr Dan Neill 

Biography   

Stephen is based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he leads a portfolio of pathogen genomic studies covering multiple bacterial species and ranging in scope from global surveillance to within host variation. He is Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded Global PneumococcalSequencing project that has sequenced and analysing the genomes of more than 31 thousand pneumococcal isolates, collected from 59 countries, before and after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. The Gates Foundation have also funded his team to perform a global genomic survey of the neonatal sepsis pathogen, Streptococcus agalactiae. 

After PhD and postdoctoral studies at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge, Stephen joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 1998 from where he has been engaged in the development of approaches to genome research and its application to the study of bacterial pathogens. 

Stephen has authored >250 publications including 27 review articles and 5 book chapters with 46694 citations and an H-index of 102 (for full listing see http://tinyurl.com/StephenBentleyScholar).