Chris van Tulleken is an NHS infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, one of the UK’s leading science presenters and a New York Times bestselling author.
Chris grew up in London and trained in medicine at Oxford University, specialising in infectious disease and tropical medicine. He has a PhD in molecular virology from Greg Towers lab and in 2016 he won the Max Perutz award for his HIV research. He is currently an Associate Professor in the division of Infection and Immunity at UCL, where his research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of child nutrition, and he works with UNICEF and the World Health Organisation.
Chris is one of the UK’s leading science presenters having worked on many flagship Health and Science programmes including: Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, Horizon, The Truth About…, Operation Iceberg, Cloud Lab, Museum of Life, and Blizzard: Race to the Pole, among others.
Operation Ouch, Chris and his brother Xand’s double BAFTA winning series for CBBC, continues to delight audiences around the world, with Series 12 being filmed in 2023. Throughout the series, the twins create fun and often disgusting experiments to help young people learn how the human body works. The programme results in fan mail from around the world from a young audience who want to know, above all, what they need to do to become doctors.
Chris and Xand’s programmes are often shaped by their readiness and ability to self-experiment and test out theories on one another (as clones, they are the ideal test and control) – whether changing their diets, exposing themselves to environmental extremes of heat, cold, sleeplessness and pain, Chris learns and informs his young audience by becoming a patient himself.
His concerns about antibiotic resistance and over-reliance on prescription drugs led him to create a campaigning series for BBC One in 2017; ‘The Dr Who Gave up Drugs’, and in 2018, he turned the focus of the topic to children with the second series, which received rave reviews.
Following on from the success of ‘The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs’, Chris investigated the impact ultra-processed foods has on our children, in ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ for BBC One. In 2023, Chris published ‘Ultra Processed People’, which became an international bestseller.
Chris lives in London with his wife and children.
