We warmly congratulate former Lister Fellow Sherif, who become Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Bradford in September 2024.
In this new role, he will champion Bradford as a centre for excellence and raise the profile of the university as a leading research institution. The university excels across a range of research areas, from digital innovations in health and social care, to cancer and skin research, to artificial intelligence and engineering.
Sherif is well-placed as a research and innovation leader, having formerly been Director of the Institute of Cancer Therapeutics, a joint appointment between The University of Sheffield and the University of Bradford dedicated to researching, developing and commercialising new cancer treatments. The institute is one of small number in the UK equipped to take treatments from the concept stage through to clinical use. He is also Professor of Molecular Medicine and co-founder of the Healthy Lifespan Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Sherif’s initial career focus was on pharmacy, but he later broadened his scope to the field of genetics and molecular medicine, developing an interest in translational medicine – taking basic science discoveries and translating them into applied clinical practice.
As an academic entrepreneur, he founded a multidisciplinary lab at the University of Sheffield that combines chemistry, biology and genetics with clinical expertise. Sherif’s research has made major contributions to our understanding of DNA breaks and repairs, and how the mechanisms of genome damage affect our health.
In particular, his research on breaks in DNA and their role in illness and the importance of repair mechanisms led Sherif and colleagues to discover an enzyme, TDP2, with major significance in healthcare. Its function is connected with a wide range of human diseases including cancer and viral infection. More recently, Sherif’s lab unravelled mechanisms of neural cell death in motor neuron disease and discovered a DNA repair mechanism that protects regulatory regions of DNA from damage, published in the journal Nature.
Sherif became a Lister fellow in 2015 and is now a full member of the Lister Institute.
You can find out more about his team’s research on the El-Khamisy Lab website
