Haroun N. Shah PhD

Haroun N. Shah obtained his PhD in Microbial Biochemistry from the University of London in 1981. He completed his MRCPath in 1990 and then became a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists (FRCPath) in 1996. He has held senior academic appointments at the University of London for 25 years with intermittent periods (2-3 years) in Canada and the Middle East. His research interest initially focused on the role of anaerobic bacteria in human diseases and encompassed microbial chemical structure, evolution, metabolism and molecular pathogenicity. He was a founder member of the “Society for Anaerobic Microbiology” (SAM) in the UK and later Canada and Chaired the Gram negative, anaerobic international taxonomic subcommittee between 1996 - 2012. When he returned to the UK, he took up his first appointment outside university in 1997 as Head of the Molecular Identification Services Unit at the UK’s Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections, London - later renamed ‘Public Health England’ (PHE) in 2013