Rick Speare Oration Lecture 2023

Laureate Professor Peter Doherty AC

Trained initially as a veterinarian, Peter Doherty is Australian immunologist and pathologist who, with Rolf Zinkernagel of Switzerland, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996 for their discovery of how the body's immune system distinguishes virus-infected cells from normal cells. After leading a research laboratory at the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania (1975–82), Peter headed the department of experimental pathology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra (1982–88) and served as chairman (1988–2001) of the department of immunology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he still holds the Michael F Tamer Chair of Biomedical Research.

In 2002, he joined the faculty of medicine at the University of Melbourne, and from 2014, has been at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture between the university and the Royal Melbourne Hospital. The Nobel award led to an increasing involvement in public science communication, both in his own area of viral pathogenesis and immunity and in topics related to environmental sustainability and climate change. He is active on social media and was a prominent commentator through the first two years of COVID-19 https://www.doherty.edu.au/news-events/setting-it-straight.

Peter is the author of many books, including The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A Life in Science (2005), Sentinel Chickens: What Birds Tell Us About Our Health and the World (2012), Pandemics: what everyone needs to know (2013) The Knowledge Wars (2015), The Incidental Tourist (2018), An Insider's Plague Year (2021) and most recently Empire, War, Tennis and Me (2022).

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