Professor Nick Beeching is an Emeritus Professor of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM). His career as a clinician and researcher started with a degree in physiology and medical training at the University of Oxford in the mid-1970s, including an elective period in St John’s Medical College, Bengaluru. He then rotated through clinical training posts in Oxford, LSTM, Adelaide, Birmingham, Riyadh and Auckland, followed by his first specialist appointment as a consultant physician in Khamis Mushayt, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for 2 years. He was appointed in 1987 to joint posts as a senior clinical lecturer at LSTM and consultant physician in the regional Tropical and Infectious Disease Unit. As Clinical Director of the unit from 1999-2016, he expanded the service together with clinical colleagues at LSTM and moved it to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital in 2001. He also held honorary consultant appointments for two decades with the UK Health Security Agency and its predecessors, and with the Army Medical Directorate. Through leadership of several UK and European committees and specialist societies, he has contributed to the development of national and international professional standards in tropical medicine and infectious diseases. This included 3 years as President of the British Infection Society, and establishing the National Travel Health Network and Centre in 2012 – chairing its steering committee for 10 years. Professor Beeching reduced his clinical work after 2018 and retired in late 2022 to live in Australia. He continues to mentor postgraduate students and clinical trainees remotely.

Much of Professor Beeching’s research has been about clinical problems seen in his daily practice in the UK and elsewhere. This has led to publication of many clinical case reports, reviews of different diseases in medical journals and textbooks, and national and international guidelines on best practice, such as the NICE guidelines on Lyme disease. He co-authored online reviews in BMJ Clinical Practice which have had a great external impact, especially his review on COVID-19 which was accessed over a million times in 2020. He has joined different teams in Liverpool and elsewhere to publish research on HIV, viral hepatitis, brain infections such as meningitis and encephalitis, travel related and emerging infections including viral haemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, and zoonoses (infections of animals that can be transmitted to man, including Lyme disease and brucellosis). As local co-lead, he was instrumental in LSTM joining the international GeoSentinel Network in 2012 to contribute to research on travel related disease. He was a co-applicant for the first National Institute for Health and Care Research Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections and co-lead for its clinical theme, linking LSTM, the University of Liverpool and Public Health England from 2015 to 2020. Professor Beeching has supervised over 30 PhD students and master’s student projects. His long-standing interests and research on viral, bacterial and parasitic gut infections have continued as a scientific focus for his most recent PhD students.