Martin Maiden has more than thirty years of experience in the NHS and academia, translating high-quality basic science into practical public health benefits, especially in bacterial vaccines, vaccination, and food safety. This has included leading/participating in large national and international studies to understand the impact of vaccines and the development of widely-adopted approaches and bioinformatics platforms for exploiting sequence-based and genomic data. He also has more than fifteen years’ experience as an undergraduate and graduate educator and in advanced training for health professionals and capacity building, especially in Europe and Africa.