Alumnus of the Year 2016: Professor Graham Serjeant

Graham Serjeant left Clare in 1960 for the London Hospital Medical School and after qualifying in 1963 and three years of house jobs at the London, the Royal United Hospital, Bath, and Hammersmith Hospital, left the UK for Jamaica where he and his wife Beryl, a medical technologist, planned to spend one year.  They quickly became involved sickle cell disease and 48 years later are still there, having directed the Medical Research Council Laboratories Unit at the University of the West Indies in Kingston until retirement in 1999. 

He now continues working with a local charity, the Sickle Cell Trust (Jamaica) founded in 1986 developing services for sickle cell disease.  Much of his work has been directed to understanding the variability of this condition and the development of cost-effective therapies appropriate to countries with limited resources.  This experience has proved valuable to many other developing societies and he travels frequently to Brazil, Africa, Saudi Arabia and India. 

He was awarded the CMG in 1981, the CD (Hon) in 1995, and the Order of Jamaica in 2015.