Professor Alan Garfinkel Awarded the Newton Abraham Visiting Professorship at Oxford for 2019-2020
The Newton Abraham Visiting Professorship in association with Lincoln College
The Newton Abraham Visiting Professorship is an exciting opportunity for a highly distinguished
researcher working in the medical, biological or chemical sciences or a related interdisciplinary
area to spend up to 12 months in Oxford. In addition to following a programme of collaborative
research, the Professor’s role involves stimulating interest in and research within her or his field,
and engagement with the wider research community at Oxford and beyond, including delivery of
the prestigious Newton Abraham Lecture. The Professor receives a salary of £65,967 per
annum (at current rates) plus personal travel expenses, and will be provided with family
accommodation, free of rent and local taxes. The Visiting Professor will be a Professorial Fellow
of Lincoln College, Oxford.
A Brief History of the Professorship
The noted biochemist Sir Edward Penley Abraham worked in
the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, where, with Ernest Chain and Howard Florey, he investigated the therapeutic potential of penicillin and played an important role in purifying it and decoding its chemical structure. E.P. Abraham subsequently worked with Guy Newton in the
discovery of the antibiotic cephalosporin. The patent income from the antibiotic enabled the establishment of several charitable trusts for the support of biomedical research,including the E.P. Abraham Research Fund. The Newton Abraham Visiting Professorship was established in 1980, with a donation from the E.P. Abraham Research Fund.
