Biography

Dr. Gregory Tyrrell is the Divisional Director for the Division of Diagnostic and Applied Microbiology and a Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Alberta. Additionally, he currently serves as the Director for International Graduate Programs for the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta and is an Associate Investigator with the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology located in Edmonton. 

Born and raised in Alberta, Dr. Tyrrell completed his BSc. and MSc. in microbiology at the University of Alberta. After obtaining his PhD. at the University of Toronto where he worked on shiga toxins performing structure/function analysis, he completed a two-year clinical microbiology fellowship program also at UToronto. Following that, he became an Assistant Professor and an Associate Microbiologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax before returning to University of Alberta in 1996.

Dr. Tyrrell’s research interests include epidemiology of Streptococcus pneumonaie, Group A strep and Group B strep. He focuses on the epidemiology of invasive cases of different streptococcus in Alberta, Canada.  From 2009 to 2011, he served as the Program Director of the clinical microbiology fellowship program within the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta.

In addition to his academic roles, Dr. Tyrrell is the Northern Alberta Zone Clinical Department Section Chief of Medical Microbiology for Alberta Precision Laboratories and has served as a clinical microbiologist for the Provincial Laboratory of Public Health (ProvLab) for over twenty years. He has overseen a variety of clinical programs including the Level 3 laboratory in the ProvLab, the tuberculosis program and the streptococcus program at the University of Alberta in addition to various other programs. Additionally, Dr. Tyrrell has served on numerous vaccine advisory groups in Canada that focus on pneumococcal and meningococcal vaccines.

His current work involves analysis of M. tuberculosis isolates in Alberta, pathogenesis of Group B streptococci and epidemiology of Group A streptococci and Streptococcus pneumonaie.