Speakers

Multidisciplinary Approaches to AMR

Conference for early- and mid-career researchers

Tuesday, 22 November 2022
ICL Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Oxford

Dr. Ewan Harrison

Head of the Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative, Wellcome Sanger Institute

Dr Harrison leads the Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative (RVI) at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and is a group leader in Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD at the University of Leicester on the bacterial genomics and pathogenesis. His post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge focused on the analysis of MRSA populations in animals and humans and tracking the transmission of MRSA in healthcare facilities. His current research combines pathogen sequencing at scale, host genetics, and microbiome data along with electronic health records to understand pathogen biology and transmission.

Prof. Syma Khalid

Professor of Computational Microbiology, Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford

Syma completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Chemistry at the University of Warwick. She then moved to the University of Oxford as a postdoc, to study the structure- function relationship of bacterial membrane proteins. In 2007, she moved to the University of Southampton as in independent group leader. In 2021 she was appointed as Professor of Computational Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Katy Thomson

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Walsh lab, Ineos Oxford Institute for Antimicrobial Research

Katy Thomson is a postdoctoral researcher at the INEOS Institute of Antimicrobial Research, University of Oxford within Professor Walsh’s group. She is currently setting up and leading the second phase of the ‘BARNARDS’ (burden of antibiotic resistance in neonates from developing societies) project, which will assess the antibiotic usage and efficacy, prevalence of antibiotic resistance in sepsis causing pathogens in neonates in low- and middle- income countries, alongside the aetiology and transmission of resistance from the hospital environment. Having worked on the original ‘BARNARDS’ project since 2015, she is aware of unresolved knowledge gaps, which the second phase of BARNARDS aims to tackle. Katy also has research interests in One Health, having worked on ‘CUT-SEC’, a project investigating potential transmission of bacteria and mobile antibiotic resistance genes between agriculture, the environment, human carriage and infection. Katy graduated from the University of Manchester with a BSc (Hons) in Biology in 2009 before completing a masters at Queen Mary University of London and is currently awaiting her doctoral degree from Cardiff University. She has previously worked as a sustainability consultant and as a researcher for Aber Instruments Ltd., where she managed analyses, development, and launching of a new automated cell counter that became a leading piece of equipment within the brewing industry and steered training for craft and large multinational brewing companies. Following on from this, she joined Professor Walsh’s group in 2015.

Prof. Alena Kamenshchikova

Assistant Professor, Maastricht University

Dr Alena Kamenshchikova is an Assistant professor at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on practices of biomedical knowledge production about human-microbial relations, and translation of this knowledge into policies and practices of infectious disease control.

Dr. Thomas Lanyon-Hogg

Career Development Fellow, Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford

After a master's degree in medicinal chemistry and PhD in biochemistry from the University of Leeds, Tom joined Imperial College London as a PDRA in drug discovery. His research focussed on challenging drug targets including membrane proteins, small GTPases and multidrug-resistant bacteria, and he conducted several successful small-molecule screens at the Institute of Cancer Research, the Dundee Drug Discovery Unit, and Diamond Light Source. In June 2020 Tom started his independent lab in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford. His group uses chemical biology methods to accelerate drug discovery, with a major research focus on the development of molecules to combat AMR.

Dr. David Smith

Postdoctoral Researcher, Institut Pasteur

I am a new face at Oxford this winter, joining Oxford Population Health as Senior Researcher. Originally trained as an ecologist and evolutionary biologist in Canada, I then came to England to work as a mathematical modeller at Public Health England, before embarking on a PhD and subsequent post-doc at Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. I use mixed methods from mathematical epidemiology and health-economic evaluation to tackle research questions related to antimicrobial resistance and infection control. I am particularly interested in how pathogen ecology influences the impact and cost-effectiveness of public health interventions.