About

Georgina Ferry interviews Keith Gull. Keith Gull FRS is the Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Professor of Molecular Microbiology. He studied microbiology at Queen Elizabeth College in London and remained there to do a PhD, moving straight into a lectureship at the University of Kent in 1972. There he used electron microscopy to study microtubules, first in fungi and later in disease-causing microbes, the trypanosomes. Gull moved to the University of Manchester in 1989 as Professor of Biochemistry, and participated in the restructuring of its School of Biological Sciences. Deciding to focus on science rather than administration, he won a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellowship, which enabled him in 2002 to move into the newly-completed EP Abraham Research Building at the Dunn School. His group explored the proteins that make up the flagella of microbes, conserved in evolution to form the cilia of mammalian cells. He has helped to reorganise graduate education in Medical Sciences at Oxford, and set up collaborations to improve the training of young scientists in Africa. Unusually, since becoming Head of House at St Edmund Hall in 2009 he has continued to lead an active research lab in the Dunn School.