3rd International symposium on the environmental dimension of antibiotic resistance

Heather Allen received her PhD in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009. After postdoctoral studies under Dr. Thad Stanton on bacteriophage diversity in the swine intestinal tract, she was appointed to a permanent scientist position at the USDA's National Animal Disease Center.

She is also an adjunct faculty member of the Veterinary Microbiology and Preventative Medicine Department at Iowa State University and a member of Faculty1000. She studies the swine intestinal microbiome and how it responds to ecosystem disturbances, including antibiotic treatment.

Doctor in Medicine, Scientific Director of the Ramón y Cajal Institute of Health (IRYCIS), Research Professor in Microbial Evolutionary Biology at the Department of Microbiology of the Ramón y Cajal University Hospital, and Senior Investigator in Bacterial Evolution at the Center for Astrobiology (CSIC-INTA) in Madrid, Spain. He is interested in multi-level population and evolutionary biology of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in different eco-environmental contexts. Member of the American Academy and European Academy for Microbiology, he is author of more than 450 research papers quoted in PubMed, and listed among ISI-highly cited scientists in Microbiology.

TAL DAGAN is professor of genomic microbiology at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2005, working with Dan Graur at Tel-Aviv University. She then moved to Germany and graduated her habilitation in 2011 working with William F. Martin at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf, where she became a faculty member in 2012. Dr. Dagan studies microbial genome evolution with a focus on the cellular mechanisms and genomic properties that underlie lateral gene transfer dynamics. In her research she develops network approaches to investigate reticulated events during prokaryotic evolution.

Michael Gillings is a member of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, where he is Professor of Molecular Evolution.  His research interests lie in the exploration of genetic diversity and how such diversity can be used to track evolutionary processes. He is particularly interested in the evolution of antibiotic resistance and the potential for pollution with antibiotics to increase basal rates of bacterial evolution.

In the past five years he has worked on bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, plants, sharks, bony fish and mammals.  He convenes one of the largest 1st year classes at Macquarie (Human Biology) with over 1100 students per semester, and supervises Postgraduate research students working on a wide range of projects, including management of endangered species, tracking antibiotic resistance, and the effects of global climate change.

Elisabeth Grohmann trained at the University of Graz, Austria in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology presently holds a position as Professor of Molecular Biology at the University Medical Centre Freiburg, Germany.

She is a Molecular Biologist with special interest in antibiotic resistance transfer among Gram-positive pathogens. Her research focuses on plasmid transfer unravelling the mechanisms of conjugative type IV secretion machines in Enterococcus, including plasmid transfer studies in Enterococcus and Staphylococcus biofilms.

Diploma in Biochemistry, Technical University Graz, Austria
PhD in Molecular Biology, Technical University Graz, Austria
1998-2010: Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology, Technical University Berlin, Germany
2011-2012: Visiting researcher, University of the Basque Country, Spain
2012-2014: Professor of Microbiology, University Freiburg, Germany
From 2014: Professor of Molecular Biology, University Medical Centre Freiburg

Isabel Henriques finished her PhD in Biology in 2006 at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. She was a post-doc from 2006 till 2013 and is currently an Assistant Researcher at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, Portugal. She has also been working as an invited assistant professor in the Biology Department, University of Aveiro. From 2012 till 2015 she is a Special Visiting Researcher at the Federal University of Pará, Brazil, funded by the Brazilian government. Her research has been oriented towards the ecology of antibiotic resistance, specifically focusing on the role of anthropogenic activities in the proliferation of resistance in aquatic systems. She has been particularly interested in characterizing main environmental reservoirs and sources of antibiotic resistance and mobile genetic elements encoding resistance in environmental bacteria. She has been using molecular biology techniques, phenotypic, genomic and metagenomic tools for this analysis. She has authored or co-authored more than 50 papers. Her work has been cited more than 800 times with h-index of 17 (WoS, September 2014).

Joakim Larsson is a Professor in Environmental Pharmacology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He received his PhD in animal physiology in 2000 in Gothenburg, and after two years of guest research at marine labs in Canada and USA, he decided to combine his interest for the environment with medicine. He became associate professor in human physiology in 2007. He currently leads a research group of about 15 people at the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Gothenburg.  The research focus of his group mainly relates to aspects on antibiotic resistance and pharmaceuticals in the environment, often including  genomic or metagenomic approaches.

His most cited papers include the identification of ethinylestradiol as an important contributor to the feminization of wild fish, and a series of studies showing that manufacturing discharges is the cause for the most severe cases of pharmaceutical pollution observed in the environment. Current projects include research on metals and antibacterial biocides in the promotion of antibiotic resistance, exploration of the environmental resistome for novel carbapenemases, evaluation of advanced effluent treatment technologies etc. In 2012, Joakim Larsson received the Erik K Fernström´s prize for young researchers. For more info, please see: http://www.biomedicine.gu.se/ominst/avd/infektion/forskare/joakim_larsson/

Amy Pruden is currently a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Graduate Education at Virginia Tech, USA. Dr. Pruden’s broad research mission is to build fundamental understanding of complex microbial communities in environmental systems in order to improve engineered approaches for advancing water sustainability and protecting public health.  She was the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2007 and also recently was honored with the 2014 Paul L. Busch Award in recognition of innovation of her research aimed at understanding antibiotic resistance genes in the water environment.

Jan Siemens is scientist and lecturer at the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation – Division Soil Science and Soil Ecology at the University of Bonn. The fate of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals in soils and their related effects on microbial communities is one of his favorite research topics that he addresses in collaboration with colleagues from environmental sciences, microbiology, and medical sciences in research groups working on veterinary medicines in manured soils and human pharmaceuticals in wastewater-irrigation systems.

Dr. Tiedje is University Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, and is Director of the Center for Microbial Ecology. His research has focused on microbial ecology, physiology and diversity, especially regarding the nitrogen cycle, environmental pollutant biodegradation and impact and more recently on the use of genomics and metagenomics to understand community structure and functions.  He has quantified ~300 antibiotic resistance genes and mobile elements in the environment using parallel qPCR and sequencing.

James M. Tiedje, Center for Microbial Ecology, Plant and Soil Science Building, 1066 Bogue Street. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824
Email: tiedjej@msu.edu

A native of Montréal, Dr. Topp obtained his PhD from the Department of Microbiology at the University of Minnesota in 1988. Since then he has toiled as a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Biology at the University of Western Ontario in London. Ed’s research concerns the interface between agriculture and human and environmental health, particularly with respect to water quality. In the last decade he has notably worked on the environmental fate, significance and management of microorganisms and pharmaceuticals carried in animal and human [biosolids] waste. Ed is a Past-President [2011] of the Canadian Society of Microbiologists and has helped organize a number of workshops and sessions concerning agriculture, the environment and antibiotic resistance.

Following a BSc in microbiology at NUI Galway Dr Walsh started research on antibiotic resistance as a PhD student under Professor Sebastian Amyes in medical microbiology at Edinburgh University. The research focused on investigating how respiratory tract pathogens could develop resistance to a new class of antibiotics; ketolides. Dr Walsh then moved to Trinity College Dublin to investigate plasmid mediated resistance in hospital acquired infections and was awarded the Health Research Board fellowship to build this research into a national analysis of resistance. During the fellowship Dr Walsh’s interest was peaked in the origins and movement of antibiotic resistance outside the clinic. In 2009 she accepted a research position at Agroscope (Swiss Federal Agriculture Research station).

The project aimed to investigate if the use of antibiotics in plant agriculture have implications for the increased availability of antibiotic resistance genes in plants used as food and the environment. This project opened a novel avenue of research for Dr Walsh in combining the areas of medical, plant agriculture and environmental aspects of antibiotic resistance and also investigating the effects of antibiotic use on microbiomes. In 2014 she returned to Ireland and Maynooth University to set up her own research group focusing on antibiotic resistance and microbiome analysis. She has published 28 papers and received several awards and honours including an outstanding service award from the American Society for Microbiology and has presented her research both at scientific conferences and public lectures.

Professor Liz Wellington is an active member of the Environment theme within the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. She holds a personal chair and, with her research group, is involved in the study of bacteria in soil and survival of pathogenic bacteria in the environment. Research work focuses on understanding the ecological roles for specific bacterial activities including antibiotic production and resistance, exoenzyme production and analysing the impact of lateral gene transfer. During the past decade expertise has been developed in the detection, quantification and analysis of soil microbial communities, including the identification of pathogen reservoirs outside of their hosts and the reservoirs of antibiotic resistance in exotic and indigenous bacteria in the environment.

Dr. Gerry Wright is the Director of the Michel G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University.  He is Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and Associate member of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology as well as Pathology and Molecular Medicine.  He received his BSc in Biochemistry (1986) and his PhD in Chemistry (1990) from the University of Waterloo working in the area of antifungal drugs.  He followed this up with 2 years of postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in Boston where he worked on the molecular mechanism of resistance to the antibiotic vancomycin in enterococci.

He joined the Department of Biochemistry at McMaster in 1993.  He holds the Michael G. DeGroote Chair in Infection and Anti-Infective Research, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Antibiotic Biochemistry and has received Canadian Institutes of Health Research Scientist (2000-2005) and Medical Research Council of Canada Scholar (1995-2000) awards. Additionally, he received Killam Research Fellowship (2011-1012), Premier’s Research Excellence (1999) and Polanyi Prize (1993) awards.  He was the American Society of Microbiology Division ‘A’ (Antimicrobial Chemotherapy) lecturer in 2007, received the Faculty of Science Alumni of Honor Award from the University of Waterloo (2007), was the 2012 Hopwood Lecturer (John Innes Centre, Norwich UK) and received the R.G.E Murray Award for Career Achievement, Canadian Society of Microbiologists in 2013.  He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2012 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2013.  He is the past director of the American Chemical Society Short Course on Antibiotics and Antibacterial Agents.  Dr. Wright was Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences for 6 years (2001-2007) and the founding director of the McMaster Antimicrobial Research Centre; he is co-founder, with Dr. Eric Brown, of the McMaster High Throughput Screening Facility. He is the Chair-Elect of Division A of the America Society for Microbiology (2014). He has consulted widely in the private sector (biotech and pharma) on aspects of antibiotic resistance and discovery and antifungal agents.  He has published over 200 papers and book chapters and is a member of the editorial boards of Chemistry and Biology (2000-present), Journal of Antibiotics (2004-present), mBio (2014-2016) and Antimicrobial Agents Chemotherapy (2011-2015) and is Associate Editor of ACS Infectious Diseases.

Areas of Research: Chemical Biology of antibiotic resistance, antibiotic discovery and modes of action, mechanisms of antibiotic biosynthesis, discovery of new antimicrobial targets.

Dr. Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory,  Taught Postgraduate Student (MSc) Programme Director in the Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Bachelor and Master degrees in Environmental Science and Engineering from Nanjing University, China, and got his Ph.D. degree from the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Zhang’s researches include applications of molecular techniques (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, etc.) in the biological wastewater treatment (N removal and P recovery), bioenergy from wastes/wastewater (cellulosic biomass, sludge, kitchen waste, and wastewater), biodegradation of emerging pollutants (antibiotics, PPCP and EDCs), antibiotic and heavy metal resistance genes, and environmental toxicology of nanoparticles and heavy metals to microorganisms. According to ResearcherID (Thomson Reuters), he has an H Index of 30 with over 145 SCI journal publications and 3000 citations. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 39, and his journal publications have been cited more than 4700 times. He is an editor of AMB Express and editorial board member of BioMed Research International, also serves as Advisor for BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute) on Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology (2011-2014), and ASM (American Society of Microbiology) Country Liaison to China (Hong Kong) (2012-2014). He is top 1% researcher (based on ISI's Essential Science Indicators) of HKU from 2009 to 2013.

Dr Yongguan (Y-G) Zhu, Professor of Soil Environmental Sciences and  Environmental Biology, currently works in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), he is the director general of the Institute of Urban Environment, CAS. He has been working on soil-plant interactions, with special emphasis on rhizosphere microbiology, biogeochemistry of nutrients, metals and emerging pollutants (such as antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes). Professor Zhu is a leader in taking multi-scale and multi-disciplinary approaches to soil and environmental problems, for example his systematic contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of arsenic in soil-plant systems and human health impacts. Before returning to China in 2002, he was working as a research fellow (Supported by the Royal Society London) in the Queen's University of Belfast, UK (1994-1995); and a postdoctoral fellow in The University of Adelaide (1998-2002), Australia. He obtained his BSc in soil science from Zhejiang Agricultural University in 1989, and MSc in soil science from the Institute of Soil Science, CAS in 1992, and then a PhD in environmental biology from Imperial College, London in 1998.

Dr Zhu is currently the co-editor-in-chief of Environmental Technology & Innovation (Elsevier), associate editor of Environment International (Elsevier), and editorial members for many international journals, such as New Phytologist, Trends in Plant Science, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Environmental Science and Pollution Research. Professor Zhu has been influential in shaping global policies related to food safety, such as setting the global rice arsenic standard. He is a scientific committee member for the ICSU program on Human Health and Wellbeing in Changing Urban Environment, and served for nine years as a member of Standing Advisory Group for Nuclear Application, International Atomic Energy Agency (2004-2012).

Professor Zhu is the recipient of many international and Chinese merit awards, among them including TWAS Science Award 2013, National Natural Science Award 2009; Professor Zhu has published over 200 papers in international journals, and these publications have attracted over 7500 citations (Web of Science).