Education
He was educated in his home town of Wallington in England, attending Wallington High School. He completed an undergraduate degree in medical sciences at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge and gained his medical qualification from the London Hospital Medical College. During the mid-1990s, he worked for a Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Gordon Dougan at Imperial College.
During this time, he captained the winning team from Imperial College in the television quiz show University Challenge, while also writing a series of articles for the British Medical Journal, introducing the medical professsion to the Internet.
Career
In recent years, he has been at the forefront of efforts to apply next-generation sequencing to problems in microbiology and ancient deoxyribonucleic acid research. In 2011, Pallen led a crowdsourced analysis of the genome of the outbreak strain from the 2011 German East. coli O104:H4 outbreak, which had been genome-sequenced on the Ion Torrent platform by the BGI. Around the same time, he also led a project in which an isolate from the 2011 German East. coli O104:H4 outbreak was genome-sequenced on three new benchtop sequencing platforms, benchmarking these new platforms. He has also shown that whole-genome sequencing can be used to track the spread of resistant bacteria and to study the emergence of antimicrobial resistance.
Through analyses of fecal samples from the 2011 German East. coli O104:H4 outbreak and sputum samples from The Gambia, Pallen showed that metagenomics can be used as a culture-independent approach to the diagnosis of bacterial infection.
He has pioneered the use of metagenomics to open up new avenues in ancient deoxyribonucleic acid research, recovering 200-year-old Mycobacterium tuberculosis genomes from human remains and a medieval Brucella genome sequence. With Vince Gaffney and Robin Allaby, he has applied shotgun metagenomics to sedimentary ancient deoxyribonucleic acid samples, showing the presence of wheat in the British Isles 2000 years earlier than expected.
Pallen is the author of a popular science book, The Rough Guide to Evolution. In the wake of the 2005 Kitzmiller v.
Dover Area School District trial, he wrote a review with Nick Matzke, outlining the evidence that the bacterial flagellum is an evolved rather than designed enitity He commissioned and peer-reviewed Baba Brinkman"s Rap Guide to Evolution and was responsible for recruiting Alice Roberts to the role of Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. in June 2011, Pallen appeared in an episode of Melvin Bragg’s In our Time radio programme.
In 2014, he shared a platform with Michael Mosley on Medicine and War at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
