Keith Gull facts for kids

Professor Keith Gull CBE FRS FMedSci (born 29 May 1948) is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Molecular microbiology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. He was the principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford from 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2018, succeeding Michael Mingos.

Education

Gull was educated at Eston Grammar School and King's College London where he was awarded a first class Bachelor of Science degree in 1969 followed by a PhD in 1973.

Career and research

On completion of his PhD, he moved to a lectureship at the University of Kent. He held a personal chair at Kent when he moved to the University of Manchester where he spent the 1990s involved with the development of the School of Biological Sciences as Head of Biochemistry and Research Dean. He moved to Oxford in 2002. He was Chairman of the Biochemical Society (1999–2002), and is a trustee of Cancer Research UK. According to Google Scholar and Scopus his most cited peer-reviewed scientific papers are on Trypanosoma brucei and Trypanosoma cruzi. More recently, the Gull laboratory has worked on Leishmania.

After nine years as Principal Professor of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Gull retired at the end of the 2017-18 academic year, and was succeeded by Kathy Willis.

Awards and honours

Among numerous prizes, fellowships, and other awards, Keith Gull was awarded the Marjory Stephenson Prize from the Society for General Microbiology (1996), was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999), elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003, and was appointed a CBE in the 2004 New Year Honours list for services to microbiology. He holds an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Kent. His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Distinguished for his contributions to our understanding of the cell and molecular biology of eukaryotic microbes, especially fungi, slime moulds and trypanosomes. His work has provided important insights into how cells construct their cytoskeletons by modulating tubulin gene expression and protein modification. His novel approaches have led to discovery of unusual mechanisms of microtubule initiation and the partitioning of genomes in sleeping sickness trypanosomes, also of the relationship of division to differentiation in these parasites. His discovery of the mode of action of the antifungal agent griseofulvin has been followed by explanations of the selective toxicity and resistance mechanisms of fungicides and anthelminthics.

Gull was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2010.