Raymond Alan Dixon FRS (born 1 December 1947) is a British microbiologist at the John Innes Centre,[1] Norwich, specialising on the molecular understanding of biological nitrogen fixation in bacteria. He was educated at the University of Reading (BSc, 1969) and the University of Sussex (DPhil, 1972).[2]
In 1972, Dixon produced the first engineered nitrogen fixing organism by transferring nitrogen fixation genes from Klebsilla pneumoniae to Escherichia coli through conjugation.[3] From 1975, Dixon continued his research at the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory, which merged with the John Innes Institute and the Cambridge Laboratory to form the John Innes Centre in 1995.[4]
Dixon was awarded the Fleming Award by the Society for General Microbiology in 1983 which recognises individuals who 'have made a distinct contribution to microbiology early in their career’.[5] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.[6] In 2019, Dixon was a recipient of the Adam Kondorosi Academia Europea Award for Advanced Research in recognition of “revolutionary discoveries in symbiosis and related fields”.[7][8]