Professor Ian Charles

Professor Ian Charles is the founding Director of the Quadram Institute. The Quadram Institute is a partnership between Quadram Institute Bioscience, the University of East Anglia, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and the BBSRC. The mission of the Quadram Institute is to understand how food and the gut microbiota are linked to the promotion of health and the prevention of disease, with an emphasis on diet and age-related diseases. We use this knowledge to develop evidence-based strategies to maximise positive impacts of food on health, from early life to the extension of a healthy lifespan in old age, and reduce the economic and societal costs of chronic diseases.

Professor Charles’s research interests are in the area of infectious diseases, the microbiome, and its impact on health and wellbeing.  I am particularly interested in harnessing ‘omics technologies to understand how microbes evolve, spread, survive and compete in the food chain to reduce foodborne illness and to counter antimicrobial resistance.

Prior to becoming the founding Director of the Quadram Institute he  was Director of the ithree institute, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.  Prof Charles has over 30 years’ experience in academic and commercial research.  My academic career has included being a founding member of The Wolfson Institute for BioMedical Research at University College London, one the UK’s first institutes of translational medicine. I have also worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Glaxo Wellcome, and founded biotech companies in the area of infectious disease, including Arrow Therapeutics, sold to AstraZeneca in 2007, and Auspherix, a venture capital backed company founded in 2013.