Professor Martin Maiden
Tutorial Fellow in Biology
Professor of Molecular Epidemiology
Head of the Department of Biology
Martin Maiden is a molecular microbiologist who was state school educated and ‘first in family’, in terms of higher education. He attended the University of Reading (BSc, Microbiology with subsidiary Chemistry) as an undergraduate and the University of Cambridge as a Postgraduate (PhD, Biochemistry) and an MRC Training Fellow. He worked for nine years in the NHS (National Institute for Biological Standards and Control), including a one-year sabbatical in Germany (Max Planck Institut für Molekulare Genetic, Berlin). He joined the University of Oxford in 1997 as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow. He has been a faculty member (Departments of Zoology and Biology), College Fellow (Hertford College), and Professor since 2004 and was Senior Proctor 2019-2020. He served on the Committee for Nominating the Vice Chancellor 2021-2028 including the nomination of the current VC. In October 2024 he became the first elected Head of the Department of Biology at Oxford. For forty years he has applied molecular approaches to studying bacteria, with an emphasis on translation to infectious disease control, especially vaccination, and a strong emphasis on open access data. He is a committed educator and academic administrator.
Undergraduate teaching
Martin gives lectures and tutorials in microbiology and infectious disease on all three taught years of the MBiol course and supervises final year MBiol courses.
Graduate teaching
Martin lectures on a number of MSc courses including those on ‘Integrated Immunology’ and ‘Global Public Health’ and has supervised many graduate students for doctoral level qualifications.
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Research interests
Martin’s group combines molecular microbiology, evolutionary, and population approaches to investigate bacterial pathogens. He retains a strong commitment to developing public health applications based on current research. His research team has, for almost 40 years, focussed on the investigation of the phenotypic consequences of bacterial pathogen diversity, principally using nucleotide sequence-based analyses. Currently he is works on population genomics approaches to these questions, establishing links between genetic traits identified by means of next generation sequencing technology with defined bacterial phenotypes. He has published more than 400 articles in peer-reviewed international journals and over 50 book chapters and other publications, spanning a range of microbial pathogens, with the majority concerning the pathogenic Neisseria and Campylobacter. He played a central role in establishing the MLST paradigm generally and developing and exploiting this approach in both of these organisms specifically. He has a particular interest in vaccination and in using population approaches, particularly carriage studies, to improve meningococcal vaccines and vaccination schedules. His group also pioneered source attribution methods for Campylobacter, which have had important implications for food safety.
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Related websites
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Publications