Virginia Barbour

Medicine Editorial Director; Chief Editor, PLoS Medicine (U.K.)

Dr. Virginia Barbour joined PLoS in 2004 and was one of the founding co-editors of PLoS Medicine; she was appointed the journal’s first Chief Editor in 2008. Her background in publishing comes from The Lancet. She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, and then medicine at UCL and Middlesex Hospital School of Medicine, London. Her specialist clinical medical training was in Haematology at the Royal Free Hospital, London. She was awarded a DPhil from Oxford University in 1997 for research into globin gene regulation. Her post-doctoral work was at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

She is the Secretary of the Committee on Publication Ethics, and is a member of the Ethics Committee for the World Association of Medical Editors. She has participated in discussions on a number of guidelines in publishing, including revisions to the CONSORT statement, and the development of the PRISMA statement. Her interests in publishing include not only open-access, but also the more rigorous reporting of research and the importance of taking an evidence-based approach to the priorities of global health.