Personal Chair: Ross Fitzgerald

Ross Fitzgerald has been made a Personal Chair in Molecular Bacteriology.

A Dublin native, Professor Fitzgerald studied Natural Sciences in Trinity College, Dublin leading to a BA (Mod) in Microbiology.

He followed this with a PhD on bacterial population genetics from the same university.

Subsequently, Professor Fitzgerald became a Visiting Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, Montana, US, where he worked on bacterial evolutionary genomics.

He then returned to Trinity College as a Research Fellow working on Staphylococcus aureus host-pathogen interactions.

He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 2004 and established the Laboratory for Bacterial Evolution and Pathogenesis, which is focussed on clinically important species of staphylococci in addition to several other major bacterial pathogens.

His group uses genome-scale approaches to understand bacterial evolution and the molecular basis of pathogenesis.

A major goal is the translation of basic discoveries into methods to assist the prevention or control of bacterial infections.