Colin Smith

I am a passionate advocate for making the most of personal genome sequence information to help guide personal healthcare and effective prescribing and this remains my current focus. An experienced professor with a demonstrated long history of working in the higher education industry as a lecturer and research leader. Skilled in genomics, bioinformatics, life sciences and public speaking. Strong education, with a PhD focused on molecular genetics of Streptomyces bacteria from the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK (registered for PhD with University of East Anglia, UK) and a first degree in microbiology from the University of Bristol, UK. I was responsible for delivering Streptomyces genomics resources to UK and European scientists through grants from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (UK) and the European Commission. Elected Fellow of Royal Society of Biology, UK (2017). I was the lead organiser of a Royal Society Theo Murphy International Scientific Meeting in 2018 ‘Changing views of translation: from ribosome profiling to high resolution imaging of single molecules in vivo’, bringing together leading scientists from across the world. I have played a lead role in several interdisciplinary research programmes at the universities of Manchester (formerly UMIST), Surrey and Brighton, UK. I established a biotech start-up company, RecombinoGen Ltd, in the 2000s with several of my former Manchester graduate students, adopting a novel strategy to develop new antibiotics through genetic hyper-recombination. I have also worked with GlaxoSmithKline, applying advanced genomic analysis approaches to further understanding some of their antibiotic production strains. I was the first person to publicly donate his own whole genome sequence under 'open consent', through the Personal Genome Project UK initiative. I have retired from my full-time university post, but continue to contribute to academic life through visiting professor appointments at King's College London, UK, and the University of Surrey, UK, in the areas of nutritional genomics and SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 genomics. In my capacity as a genomics consultant I am presently focussing on facilitating public involvement in harnessing personal genome sequence data to guide healthcare and wellbeing decisions. I have real-world personal experience of the general hype surrounding genomics and its potential capacity to transform medicine. On the ground I can see that there is so much that needs to be done to address the gulf in understanding between clinical practice, the genomics data providers and members of the public. I think there is very little connection between the different stakeholders and so much inertia in bringing genomics into clinical practice and health screening, from the clinicians and the public. I am hoping to play a part in bridging this gulf.