Houghton Trust Trustee

Professor Fiona Tomley
CBE

Fiona is Chair of Experimental Parasitology at The Royal Veterinary College (RVC), London.

She is a microbiology graduate with a PhD and post-graduate training in virology, and since the late 1980’s her research has focused mainly on coccidial parasites of chickens, with particular interest in how parasites attach to and invade host cells.

Before joining the RVC Fiona spent ~25 years working for the Institute for Animal Health, initially at the Houghton Laboratory in Cambridgeshire and then at the Compton Laboratory in Berkshire, from where she retired as Director of Science in 2010.

She has published ~ 170 research articles, won >£40M in competitive grant funding and supervised or mentored many early career researchers.

Since 2019 she has been Director and Principal Investigator of the GCRF One Health Poultry Hub, an interdisciplinary impact-driven research network working with 27 partner institutions in sites across four Asian countries to increase sustainability of chicken production whilst reducing transmission of zoonotic diseases and antimicrobial resistance.

Fiona has been a member of the Houghton Trust since 2015, a Trustee since 2017 and in May 2022 became Chair of the Trust upon the retirement of Professor Dick Jones.