The Tenth Joel Mandelstam Lecture

Professor Tracy Palmer, FRS
Professor of Microbiology, Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences,
Newcastle University
The Type VII secretion system in the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus

Tracy Palmer holds a BSc and a PhD in Biochemistry, from the University of Birmingham. Following a postdoc at the University of Dundee she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to establish her own research group at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. Tracy was awarded tenure in 2000, and was promoted to professor in 2005. In 2007 she joined the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, where she headed the Division of Molecular Microbiology for nine years. Very recently (August 2018) she joined the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology at Newcastle University as Professor of Microbiology. Tracy’s research interests are in bacterial protein export pathways.
She has a long-standing collaboration with Prof Ben Berks (Biochemistry, Oxford), collectively identifying components of the bacterial twin arginine protein transport (Tat) pathway and defining the key mechanistic features of Tat- dependent protein export. Tracy has now published more than 80 papers on this topic. More recently she started to work on the Type VII protein secretion pathway in human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, showing that the system is important for virulence and for interbacterial competition. Tracy was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2009, a Fellow of The American Academy of Microbiology in 2015, a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2017 and a Fellow of the Royal Society earlier this year. She is a long-standing editor of the Journal Molecular Microbiology and has organized and chaired several international meetings including two Gordon Research Conferences. She serves the scientific community in a number of roles including as a member of Microbiology Society Council, and as panel member for both the Wellcome Trust Infection and Immunobiology Section and the BBSRC Appointments Board. She sat on both Sub-panel 5 (biological sciences) and the Equality and Diversity Panel of REF2014. Research in Tracy’s group is currently funded by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and by the BBSRC.