SPEAKER'S PROFILES
Dorothy Crawford
Dorothy Crawford qualified in medicine from St Thomas’s Hospital, London, in 1968. She was awarded a PhD from Bristol University for studies on Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in 1976. She became a member of the Royal College of Pathologists in 1981 and a Fellow of the College in 1991. After holding a Research Fellowship at University College, London, Dorothy was appointed Senior Lecturer and subsequently Reader in Virology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, where she gained an MD in 1987 and a DSc in 1992. She was appointed Professor of Medical Microbiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1990. Professor Crawford took the Robert Irvine Chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Edinburgh in 1997, headed the School of Biomedical Sciences from 2004-2007, and was appointed Assistant Principal for Public Understanding of Medicine in 2007. Professor Crawford was the first to identify EBV as the cause of B lymphoproliferative disease (BLPD) in the immunocompromised host and more recently to successfully treat this potentially fatal disease with T cell immunotherapy. She has published around 200 research papers. She has also published two books on microbes for a general audience: The Invisible Enemy: A natural history of viruses (OUP 2000) and Deadly Companions: how microbes shaped our history (OUP 2007), and wrote a regular science column for the Scotsman newspaper from 2008-2009. Professor Crawford was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001 and awarded an OBE for services to medicine and higher education in 2005.
