Major General Professor John Pearn

Major General Professor John Hemsley Pearn AO RFD is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. He is Emeritus Professor at the School of Clinical Medicine, University of Queensland.

Professor Pearn has served continuously for five decades in senior clinical appointments, primarily in paediatrics. In this context, he has also published extensively on clinical medicine, particularly in the fields of human genetics, neurology and envenomation. He has worked in three independent specialties – paediatrics, neurology and clinical genetics. For the last 30 years, he has practised exclusively in clinical paediatrics with several periods, on deployed operational military service, as Senior Physician and Intensivist.

Major General Pearn is the former Surgeon General of the Australian Defence Force (1998-2000). He has served in senior appointments in Military Medicine, including a non-medical role as Defence Platoon Commander in the Royal Green Jackets, London. He has held a series of sequential senior military appointments in Australia, including National Director Medical Research, Board Member of the Army Malaria Institute and, in 1997, the National Honorary Colonel of the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps).

He has served on operational service in PNG during Confrontation (1966); and as the Intensive Care Physician and Specialist Physician in Vietnam (1970), and in the United Nations’ Emergency Force following the Rwanda genocide (1994-95). He also served as the Intensivist and Specialist Physician to the (civilian) Queensland Emergency Response, to the Banda Aceh tsunami in 2004.

Professor Pearn is the author of more than 700 papers in the international refereed literature, and 60 books and booklets. These cover (principally) the domains of clinical medicine, medical research, injury prevention and safety promotion, bioethics, preventive medicine, military medicine, Australian history and medical biography.

He has pursued a professional lifetime of clinical and laboratory research, with more than 700 research papers published in refereed journals in the domains of experimental pathology, clinical paediatrics, human clinical genetics, neurology, envenomation, military medicine and medical history.

Professor Pearn has received more than 100 Awards, both national and international, for services and contributions to healthcare. These have included The Ibn Al Jazzar Medal (Tunisia), 1998; The Ramsay Medal (UK; 2000); The Ireland Medal (2005); the Commemoration Medal (425 years) of the National University of Mexico (2007); the 50th Anniversary Independence Medal (Papua New Guinea) (2010); The Gold Medal of the American Biographic Institute; The Esteemed Visitors Medal (The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, USA); and the Macdonald Critchley Gold Medal (London, 2016).

Contact: j.pearn@uq.edu.au