Leszek Borysiewicz

Sir Leszek Krzysztof Borysiewicz FRS FRCP FMedSci FLSW DL (born 13 April 1951) is a British professor, immunologist and scientific administrator with Polish-Welsh roots. He served as the 345th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, his term of office (a maximum of seven years) started on 1 October 2010 and ended on 1 October 2017. Borysiewicz also served as chief executive of the Medical Research Council of the UK from 2007-2010.

Leszek Krzysztof Borysiewicz was born in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, to Jan and Zofia (née Wołoszyn) Borysiewicz, ethnic Polish World War II-era refugees (from what is present-day Belarus) who came to Great Britain with the Anders' Army. He still speaks fluent Polish.

Borysiewicz studied medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine and received a PhD from Imperial College London in 1986 for his thesis on Cell mediated immunity to human cytomegalovirus infection (cytotoxic T cell and natural killer cell mediated lysis of human cytomegalovirus infected cells) supervised by J.G.P. Sissons and Keith Peters.

Borysiewicz pursued a career in academic medicine at the University of Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Wolfson College, and then as a consultant at Hammersmith Hospital. He headed the Department of Medicine at the University of Wales before joining Imperial College London, where he was promoted to Deputy Rector responsible "for the overall academic and scientific direction of the College," In September 2007, it was reported he would succeed Colin Blakemore as the 9th head of the Medical Research Council, a national organisation that supports medical science with an annual budget of around £500 million.

Borysiewicz's research focuses on viral immunology, infectious disease, and viral-induced cancer. He has co-authored and co-edited a number of books on these subjects, including Vaccinations.

Awards and honours

In the 2001 New Year Honours he was made a Knight Bachelor (Sir) for services to vaccine research

In 2002 he was awarded the Moxon Trust Medal of the Royal College of Physicians. He is also a Governor of the Wellcome Trust, a council member of Cancer Research UK, a founding fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and co-chair of the MRC's advisory group on stem cell research. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of medicine in 2010 at the University of Sheffield. Borysiewicz is also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

In October 2018 he was awarded with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, the highest-ranked Polish order of merit awarded to foreigners or Poles resident abroad for their services to Poland. He collected it during a ceremony at the Polish Embassy in London in late April 2019.