Martin Maiden is a name shared by two prominent British academics at the University of Oxford, each distinguished in a different field.
1. Martin Maiden (Linguist)
Martin Maiden FBA (born 20 May 1957) is a British linguist specializing in Romance linguistics, particularly Eastern Romance languages. He is the Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
- Education: He studied Modern and Medieval Languages (French, Italian, Romance philology, and general linguistics) at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1980), and earned a PhD in Linguistics in 1987 with a thesis titled Metaphony and the Italian dialects: A Study in Morphologisation.
- Career: He was a lecturer in Italian at the University of Bath (1982–1989), then lecturer in Romance Philology at the University of Cambridge (1989–1996) and a Fellow of Downing College. He took up his position at Oxford in 1996.
- Research: His work focuses on the history and structure of the Romance languages, including varieties of Romanian, Dalmatian, Italian and Italo-Romance dialects, historical linguistics, morphology, and dialectology. He has authored or edited numerous books, including A Linguistic History of Italian (1995), The Dialects of Italy (1997), A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian (2007), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (2016), The Romance Verb (2018), and The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology (2021).
- Honours: He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest, was appointed a Commander in the Romanian National Order of Faithful Service (2013), elected a Member of Academia Europaea (2018), and made a Membro corrispondente of the Italian Accademia della Crusca (2019).
2. Martin Maiden (Microbiologist)
Martin Christopher James Maiden is an English microbiologist. He is Head of Department and Professor of Molecular Epidemiology in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Hertford College.
- Education: He studied Microbiology with subsidiary Chemistry at the University of Reading (BSc) and earned a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge.
- Career: He worked for nine years in the NHS (National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) before moving to Oxford.
- Research: His group studies the population biology and evolution of bacterial pathogens, focusing on Neisseria meningitidis and Campylobacter jejuni. He is widely known as the developer of multilocus sequence typing (MLST), a method of molecular typing of bacteria that has been applied to most bacteria of medical and veterinary importance.
- Honours: He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists (2010), a Fellow of the Society of Biology (2012), a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2016), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2016). He has been cited over 62,000 times according to Google Scholar.
