Martin CJ Maiden 25th International Pathogenic Neisseria Conference 2026

Martin CJ Maiden

After an initial training in microbiology at the University of Reading, Martin’s graduate studies at the University of Cambridge with Peter Henderson pioneered the investigation of sugar transport proteins in Escherichia coli using sequence-based approaches, work which established the close relationship of bacterial and eukaryotic transport proteins. After a two-year MRC Training Fellowship in Cambridge, he began his independent research career at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, where he remained for nine years as a group leader focusing on the application of molecular and population biology to vaccines against Neisseria meningitidis. In 1997, after a year’s sabbatical in Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow with Mark Achtman, he moved to the University of Oxford, as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow with Brian Spratt, further expanding the population and evolutionary aspects of his work and establishing the MLST paradigm in 1998. In 2004 he was appointed Professor of Molecular Epidemiology at Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Royal College of Pathologists, and the Royal Society of Biology. He was the Microbiology Society Marjory Stephenson Prize Lecturer for 2020, and Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford 2019-2020. He was elected the Head of Department of Biology, University of Oxford, from October 2024. Martin has, for 40 years, investigated the phenotypic consequences of bacterial diversity in academia and the NHS. His group develops population genomics approaches, studying the relationships of genetic traits with defined bacterial phenotypes. He has published more than 400 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, books, chapters and other publications, spanning a range of microbial pathogens, but especially the pathogenic members of the genera Neisseria and Campylobacter. He is an active teacher, communicator, and academic administrator with a special interest in translating the latest advances in molecular microbiology into clinical and public health benefits.