How was the vaccine designer Sarah Gilbert honoured in August 2021?

Many people owe their lives to the work of Sarah Gilbert and her team at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford. Her vaccinology research has focused on diseases such as influenza, Middle-East respiratory syndrome, malaria and Ebola. She was involved with the development of a new vaccine to protect against coronavirus since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. As with her earlier work, the COVID-19 vaccine makes use of an adenoviral vector, which stimulates an immune response against the coronavirus spike protein. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is now the most widely used around the world, with doses sent to more than 170 countries.

Sarah Catherine Gilbert, born 1962 in Kettering, Northamptonshire, studied at the University of East Anglia and then the University of Hull, where her 1986 doctorate was in the field of genetics and biochemistry. She became a University Lecturer at the University of Oxford in 1999, Reader in Vaccinology in 2004 and then Professor in 2010.

The year before she was appointed University Lecturer at Oxford Sarah Gilbert gave birth to triplets. All three decided to study biochemistry, her daughters at Oxford, her son at the University of Bath.

Her work has been publicly acclaimed. In addition to her University chair at Oxford she was recognised with a damehood in the June 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours. In August 2021 came the crowning honour: Barbie maker Mattel announced that it had created a doll of Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert.