Dr Tom Fletcher

Biography

Tom Fletcher is a Professor of Emerging and High Consequence Infectious Diseases, and Director of the Global Health Trials Unit at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM). He is also an honorary Consultant in Infectious Diseases and General Internal Medicine at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and UK Health Security Agency. After completing undergraduate training at University of Leeds, Tom undertook his general duties in the Defence Medicine Services and then higher specialist training in Liverpool, before retiring from the military in 2024. He was seconded to the department of Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases at HQ World Health Organisation for a year before the 2013-15 Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in West Africa, during which he and colleagues from the World Health Organisation clinical team led a step change in Ebola case management. For his PhD Tom undertook a Wellcome Trust fellowship investigating Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever in Turkiye. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he returned to HQ World Health Organisation clinical team and was deployed to South Korea before returning to support the UK NHS response. He continues to deploy to filovirus disease outbreaks for the World Health Organisation, most recently in Uganda in 2022 and Rwanda in 2024.

Research interests

Tom’s research at LSTM is mainly focussed on high-consequence infectious diseases, where he is the Co-Director of the ACTIVE platform – ACcelerating Therapeutics and dIagnostics in Viral HaEmorrhagic fever. He has active research programmes in Turkiye and West Africa. Tom is a senior investigator within the AGILE trial platform, leading AGILE International and the laboratory pillar. He was a candidate chief investigator on 2 early phase trials of novel therapeutics in COVID-19 in the UK and South Africa. In Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever he is the Chief Investigator in the UMIT-1 and UMIT-2 therapeutic trials and through his network has developed and evaluated near patient diagnostic platforms. His other research focusses on emerging infections, including in pathogenesis the loss of haemostasis in viral haemorrhagic fevers. He is the chief investigator of the SAND program, a one health grant with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia developing diagnostic tests for zoonotic infections. He is currently the Chair the World Health Organisation mpox guideline development group.

Teaching