Premier's Speeches
Professor Sir John Bell Biography
Professor Sir John Bell has been Regius Professor of Medicine since 2002 and in 2008 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and was made a Knight Bachelor for his services to Medical Science. He has been President of The Academy of Medical Sciences since 2006.
Professor Bell came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to train in medicine and undertook postgraduate training in London and at Stanford University. At Stanford he developed research interests in the area of immunology and genetics. He returned to Oxford as a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow in 1987 and was elected to the Nuffield Professorship of Clinical Medicine in Oxford in 1992. He has made major contributions to the development of UK clinical and medical science. In 2004, he chaired the Academy of Medical Sciences Working Party on Strengthening Clinical Research and was appointed by the Chancellor in 2006 to Chair the Office for the Strategic Coordination of Health Research, the body responsible to co-ordinate the research functions of the NIHR and the MRC.
Professor Bell's scientific expertise is in the fields of immunology and genetics. He founded the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in 2003, which houses one of the world's most successful genetics programmes identifying common disease susceptibility factors. He sits on a wide range of advisory panels for public and private sector bodies responsible for biomedical research in Canada, Sweden, Denmark, France, Singapore and the UK. He is a non-executive director of Roche AG (since 2001). He has been a founding director of three biotechnology start up companies, two of which spun out of his laboratory. Professor Bell is a Board Member of UK Biobank and is Chairman of the Oxford Health Alliance, a private public partnership that sponsors research and advocacy on chronic disease globally. He is a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee.
