Alan McNally

Alan McNally is a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Birmingham, UK. He works on the evolutionary genomics and antimicrobial resistance in bacterial pathogens.

Education
Following undergraduate training at the University of Glasgow (1994-1999), McNally was awarded a PhD in Molecular Microbiology from the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh, in 2003.

Research
His laboratory is known for work on:
 * Yersinia species as a model organism for studying bacterial evolution,
 * how bacterial genetic variability can be used to track changes in bacterial populations,
 * how lineages of COVID-19 can vary in their viral load,

He has active collaborations in the UK, China, Germany, France, Vietnam, and the US.

COVID-19 pandemic work
During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, McNally was seconded to the Milton Keynes Lighthouse Labs as Infectious Disease lead at the Government’s first flagship COVID-19 testing facility. Launched on 9 April 2020, the Milton Keynes Lighthouse Lab was the first of three UK ‘mega-labs’ that vastly increased the testing capacity, allowing many more patient samples to be processed each day.