Andrew Pollard

Andrew Pollard is Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford and consultant in paediatric infectious disease at Oxford Children's Hospital. He is chair of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and immunisation (since 2013) and member of WHO’s SAGE 2016-2022. He received a knighthood in 2021 for services to public health especially in the pandemic.

 

Andrew's research has focussed on the understanding of childhood immunity and vaccine protection, testing vaccines against the encapsulated bacteria which cause meningitis, pneumonia and typhoid and informing global immunisation policy. He has pioneered the use of controlled human infection challenge models to investigate the biology of infections and to test vaccines for typhoid and paratyphoid. His subsequent research has included large epidemiological studies and vaccines trials in South Asia and Africa involving more than 100,000 children.

 

He led testing of influenza vaccines for children in the 2009 pandemic, new vaccines for Ebola in the 2014/15 outbreak, and clinical development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID19 vaccine in the 2020/21 coronavirus pandemic for which the team were awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal.