Sarah Gilbert

Dame Sarah Catherine Gilbert FRS (born April 1962) is an English vaccinologist who is a Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Vaccitech. She specialises in the development of vaccines against influenza and emerging viral pathogens. She led the development and testing of the universal flu vaccine, which underwent clinical trials in 2011. In January 2020, she read a report on ProMED-mail about four people in China suffering from a strange kind of pneumonia of unknown origin in Wuhan. Within two weeks, a vaccine had been designed at Oxford against the new pathogen, which later became known as COVID-19. On 30 December 2020, the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine she co-developed with the Oxford Vaccine Group was approved for use in the UK. As of January 2022, more than 2.5 billion doses of the vaccine have been released to more than 170 countries worldwide. Early life and education Sarah Catherine Gilbert was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Her father was an office manager for a shoemakers and her mother was a primary school teacher. Gilbert attended Kettering High School for Girls, where she realised that she wanted to work in medicine. She earned nine O-Levels with six A grades. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in biological sciences from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 1983. While at UEA she began playing the saxophone, which she would practise in the woods around the UEA Broad so as not to disturb others in her halls. She moved to the University of Hull for her doctoral degree, where she investigated the genetics and biochemistry of the yeast Rhodosporidium toruloides, graduating with a PhD in 1986.