Professor Andrew Pollard

Sir Andrew Pollard is Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and Ashall Professor of Infection and Immunity at the University of Oxford and consultant in paediatric infectious disease at Oxford Children’s Hospital. He is the longest serving chair of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and immunisation (since 2013) and was a member of WHO’s SAGE 2016-2022. He received a knighthood in 2021 for services to public health.

Andrew leads 200 researchers working with the mission to improve human health through immunisation and his own research has focussed on the understanding of childhood immunity and vaccine protection, testing vaccines against the encapsulated bacteria which cause meningitis, pneumonia, typhoid and paratyphoid and informing global immunisation policy. He has pioneered the use of controlled human infection challenge models to investigate the biology of infections and to test vaccines for typhoid and paratyphoid. His research has included large epidemiological studies and vaccines trials in Europe, South Asia and Africa involving more than 100,000 children. His seminal work on typhoid supported the WHO prequalification of a new typhoid conjugate vaccine and WHO recommendations for its use in countries with a high burden of disease.

He led testing of influenza vaccines for children in the 2009 pandemic, new vaccines for Ebola in the 2014/15 outbreak, and clinical development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID19 vaccine in the 2020/21 coronavirus pandemic for which the team were awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal.

He has supervised 50 PhD students and his publications include over 800 manuscripts and books on various topics in paediatrics and infectious diseases. He has received multiple awards including the James Spence Medal of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, The Rosen von Rosenstein Medal of the Swedish Society if Medicine and the Bill Marshall Award of the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Disease.

Last updated: 15 September 2025