Professor Mark Nicol is a medical microbiologist in the Division of Infection and Immunity in the School of Biomedical Sciences. He also holds an honorary appointment at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has a passion for using modern molecular tools to understand complex microbial communities, investigating how imbalances in these communities cause illness and to develop and test better diagnostics for infections, particularly for diseases relating to poverty. 

Specific focus areas of Dr Nicol’s research are the pathogenesis and diagnosis of respiratory infection and asthma in children, development, evaluation and implementation of novel diagnostic tests for tuberculosis, the cascade of care for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis and the role of the microbiome in early childhood development and illness. Professor Nicol has done seminal work on diagnostics for tuberculosis in children and adults, which has provided an evidence base for the new molecular tuberculosis tests used worldwide, and has contributed to many WHO policy recommendations and guidelines. 

Professor Nicol has successfully competed for grants from major national and international funders, including funding from the Australian NHMRC (Investigator Award, L2), National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust. He is a member of the advisory board for several large biotech companies and grant consortia, and a member of the International Interview Panel for the Wellcome Trust. 

He is chairperson of the World Health Organization Advisory Group for Tuberculosis Diagnostics and Laboratory Strengthening, a member of the WHO Tuberculosis Guideline Development Group and serves as a Consultant to the Antimicrobial Resistance Division of WHO.