Professor Barry James Marshall serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at the University of Western Australia. He received his medical degree at The University of Western Australia in 1974. In 1981, Professor Marshall and Dr J. Robin Warren studied the presence of spiral bacteria in association with gastritis. In 1982, Helicobacter pylori (H.pylori) were cultured for the first time and they developed their hypothesis related to the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer. In 1984, the World Health Organisation gave this recognition and that H.pylori was the main cause of stomach cancer. Marshall and Warren’s work is acknowledged as the most significant discovery in the history of gastroenterology and is compared to the development of the polio vaccine and the eradication of smallpox.

Professor Marshall received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Dr J. Robin Warren) as well as several other national and international awards. Representative of these awards have been the Warren Alpert Prize, the Australian Medical Association Award and the Albert Lasker Award in 1995, the Gairdner Award in 1996, the Paul Enrlich Prize in 1997, the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine, the Florey Medal, and the Buchanan Medal in 1998, the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Life Sciences in 1999, the Keio Medical Science Prize in 2002, the Australian Centenary Medal in 2003, the Western Australian Citizen of the Year in 2006, the Western Australian of the Year and The Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia in 2007, and the Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Medallist in 2011.