Professor Wilcox is a Consultant/Head of Microbiology Research & Development / and Infection Lead of the Leeds NIHR Diagnostic Technologies Medical Technology and In Vitro Diagnostic Co-operative at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust; Professor of Medical Microbiology, Sir Edward Brotherton Chair of Bacteriology, at the University of Leeds; lead on C. difficile infection and Clinical Advisor on COVID-19 testing for UK Health Security Agency; and National Clinical Director, Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Prevention and Control for NHS England.

He has formerly been the Director of Infection Prevention (4 years), Infection Control Doctor (8 years), Clinical Director of Pathology (6 years) and Head of Microbiology (15 years) at LTHT.

During the pandemic, Professor Wilcox was a member of UK Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE, COVID-19) and chaired one of its subgroups on Nosocomial Infection. He was co-chair of DHSC’s UK Technical Validation Group for COVID-19 tests, and was the clinical lead for winter virus multiplexing. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative’s COMBACTE-NET consortium. From 2017, he was seconded one day per week to NHS Improvement to support the delivery of the new national target to reduce healthcare-associated Gram-negative bloodstream infections in England. He was the Deputy Chair of the UK Department of Health’s Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (ARHAI) Committee up until 2018; he became an invited expert/observer to this committee from 2021 to the present.

He is an expert advisor to the Department of Health in England on healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs), UK NICE (C. difficile management and antimicrobial evaluations project), the UK EPIC/NICE projects, the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme on Healthcare Associated Infection, the Wellcome Trust and CARB-X panel on novel antimicrobials, the Centre for Health Economics (University of York) for the (UK NICE) evaluation of the value of antibiotics to the NHS, and the European Centre for Disease Control. He is a member of UK, European and US working groups on C. difficile infection, and is on the Editorial Boards of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Journal of Hospital Infection and Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice.  He has provided clinical advice as part of the FDA/EMA submissions for the approval of several novel antimicrobial agents, 1998-2022.

Professor Wilcox heads a Healthcare Associated Infection research team at the University of Leeds (https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/faculty-/dir-record/research-groups/905/healthcare-associated-infection-research-group), comprising ~30 doctors, scientists and nurses; projects include multiple aspects of Clostridium difficile infection, diagnostics, antibiotic resistance and the gut microbiome, staphylococcal infection, and the clinical development of new antimicrobial agents.  He has a track record of translational research (https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/medicine/staff/3541/professor-mark-wilcox), including providing the basis of clinical advice to the NHS. He has been the Principal/UK Investigator for 16 clinical trials of new anti-infective drugs, 1999-2022, has carried out multiple NIHR portfolio studies on healthcare-associated infection topics. He has authored >600 papers and published a number of books and chapters. He is co-editor of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (5th/6th/7th Eds, 2007/12/15).