Mark Pallen


Mark J. Pallen is a Research Leader at the Quadram Institute and Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of East Anglia. In recent years, he has been at the forefront of efforts to apply next-generation sequencing to problems in microbiology and ancient DNA research.

Education

Pallen was educated in his home town of Wallington in England, attending Wallington High School. He completed an undergraduate degree in medical sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and gained his medical qualification from the London Hospital Medical College. During the mid-1990s, he worked for a PhD under the supervision of Gordon Dougan at Imperial College. During this time, he captained the winning team from Imperial College in the TV quiz show University Challenge, while also writing a series of articles for the British Medical Journal, introducing the medical profession to the Internet.

Bacterial Genomics and Metagenomics

In 2011, Pallen led a crowdsourced analysis of the genome of the outbreak strain from the, which had been genome-sequenced on the Ion Torrent platform by the BGI. Around the same time, he also led a project in which an isolate from the was genome-sequenced on three new benchtop sequencing platforms, benchmarking these new platforms. He has also shown that whole-genome sequencing can be used to track the spread of resistant bacteria
and to study the emergence of antimicrobial resistance
Through analyses of fecal samples from the and sputum samples from The Gambia, Pallen showed that metagenomics can be used as a culture-independent approach to the diagnosis of bacterial infection. He has pioneered the use of metagenomics to open up new avenues in ancient DNA research, recovering 200-year-old Mycobacterium tuberculosis genomes from human remains and a medieval Brucella genome sequence. With Vince Gaffney and Robin Allaby, he has applied shotgun metagenomics to sedimentary ancient DNA samples, showing the presence of wheat in the British Isles 2000 years earlier than expected.

Public Understanding of Science

Pallen is the author of a popular science book, The Rough Guide to Evolution. In the wake of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, he wrote a review with Nick Matzke, outlining the evidence that the bacterial flagellum is an evolved rather than designed entity. He commissioned and peer-reviewed Baba Brinkman's Rap Guide to Evolution and was responsible for recruiting Alice Roberts to the role of Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. In June 2011, Pallen appeared in an episode of Melvin Bragg's In our Time radio programme. In 2014, he shared a platform with Michael Mosley on Medicine and War at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
In 2018, Pallen wrote a book on the 1978 smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom, The Last Days of Smallpox: Tragedy in Birmingham,
which includes a mixture of popular science and a historical narrative of the outbreak and subsequent courtcase.