Prof. Peter Ghazal OBE FMedSciIn Memoriam

Professor Peter Ghazal OBE FMedSci formed Fios Genomics in 2008 with the vision of creating a standalone, biology focussed data analysis service provider. Peter remained on the Board of the Company until his sad passing in April 2024.

 Peter held the Sêr Cymru II Chair of Systems Medicine at Cardiff Medical School, Systems Immunity Research Institute and Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol Medical School. He was previously the founding Director of the Scottish Centre for Genomic Technology and Informatics and former Head of the Division of Pathway Medicine where Fios was formed, Associate Director of Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology at Edinburgh University. Prior to joining the Edinburgh Medical School faculty, he was Associate Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, a Scholar of the American Leukemia Society and Fellow of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  

 His career spanned 15 years in the USA (first as a Fellow at NIH in Bethesda MD and subsequently as Faculty member at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla CA and for the last 22 years in the UK; he has published over 200 papers and 9 patents. He was founder of three start-up companies including Fios at the interface of engineering and biology.  Peter served as member or chair of a number of national and international advisory boards, think tanks, and review committees within both academia, industry, charitable and government bodies in the UK, EU, USA and Canada, including Chair of the Virus Scientific Advisory Board for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the NIH NIAID Human Immunology Project Consortium in the USA.  He was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. In 2023, Peter was awarded an OBE for ‘services to systems immunology’.