Matthew Berriman

Matt leads a programme in the genomics of Neglected Tropical Disease parasites, including helminths such as Schistomosomes, tapeworms, roundworms, hookworms, threadworms and whipworms.

Matt graduated in 1994 from the University of Manchester with a degree in biochemistry.

He moved to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the University of Dundee to undertake a PhD with Professor Alan Fairlamb, biochemically characterising a putative drug target from the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. After being awarded a Wellcome Trust Travelling Prize Fellowship, Matt moved to the laboratory of Professor George Cross at Rockefeller University in New York to study Trypanosome telomeres. At the end of 2000, he joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute as a Senior Computer Biologist in the Pathogen Sequencing Unit. There, he analysed and annotated the genomes of Plasmodium falciparum and Trypanosoma brucei. From 2003, Matt took over the leadership of more than 20 eukaryotic pathogen sequencing projects, primarily focused on the medically important Apicomplexan and Kinetoplastid protozoa, which include malaria parasites and trypanosomes, respectively. Matt joined the faculty in 2008 and is leading a programme in the genomics of Neglected Tropical Disease parasites, which include parasitic helminths such as Schistomosomes, tapeworms, roundworms, hookworms, threadworms and whipworms.