Anthony Segal


Anthony Walter Segal FRS FMedSci is a British physician/scientist.

Education

He was educated at the University of Cape Town and University of London.

Career and research

Tony Segal was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in a small town called Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia. He was schooled locally and then studied Medicine at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur hospital, where he undertook house-physician and house-surgeon positions. After six months as a medical registrar in the cardiothoracic department of Wentworth Hospital in Durban he moved to London where he attended the Royal College of Surgeons and obtained his primary fellowship. He then worked in the Accident and Emergency department at the Hammersmith hospital, followed by six months as senior house officer to the rheumatologist Eric Bywaters.
Tony then moved to the MRC Clinical Research Centre as registrar in Gastroenterology, during which time he studied Biochemistry at evening classes at Chelsea College. Over the next decade he specialised as a gastroenterologist and held various positions at Northwick Park and the Hammersmith hospitals before moving to University College London as a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow. In 1986 he was appointed to the Charles Dent Chair of Medicine, a position that he has held ever since, and Head of the Centre for Molecular Medicine.
Initially a clinical gastroenterologist, his interest in immunity resulted in him starting a clinical service for immunodeficiency. He served on the Council of the European Society for Clinical Investigation for four years, and in 1984 he started the Phagocyte Workshop of that society, which is running to this day. He was a member of three of the finding panels of the Wellcome Trust, chairing the International Interest group. In 1998 he was a Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has served on and chaired, several Royal Society committees. He has been Charles Dent Professor of Medicine, University College London, since 1986. He was a founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998. In 2014 he was awarded the UCL Prize Lecture in Clinical Science Prize. His recent work is concerned with Crohn's disease and the role played by neutrophils in killing bacteria and fungi.
He was a co-founder of three biotech companies, University Diagnostics, Inpharmatica and Ark Therapeutics.

Recent key publications