Interdisciplinary approaches to combatting antimicrobial resistance

Professor Sadaf Farooqi (PhD, FRCP, FMedSci, FRS) is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an internationally leading Clinician Scientist who has made seminal contributions to understanding the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie obesity and its complications. The work of Sadaf Farooqi and her colleagues has fundamentally altered the understanding of how body weight is regulated. With colleagues, she discovered and characterised the first genetic disorders that cause severe childhood obesity and established that the principal driver of obesity in these conditions was a failure of the control of appetite. Her work is often cited as an exemplar of how the translation of research into the mechanisms of disease can lead to patient benefit. She has received a number of awards including the 2024 Outstanding Clinical Investigator Award from the Endocrine Society. In 2021, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of her exceptional contribution to science.

Professor Linington studies natural products for antiinfective drug discovery. His laboratory is interested in untargeted metabolomics, high-throughput screening and data science integration for large-scale bioactivity annotation of natural products libraries

Nadine Ziemert studied biology at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she received her Ph.D. She then spent several years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California. She also worked there as a project scientist in 2013-14. In 2014, she returned to Germany and accepted a professorship in Translational Natural Product Genomics at the University of Tübingen. Since 2019, she is a full professor in Tübingen.

Cell biologist working on infection of macrophages and tuberculosis.

Iruka N Okeke is Professor at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and a Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellow.  Iruka’s research group investigates the mechanisms bacteria use to colonize humans, cause disease and gain antimicrobial resistance.  She also studies laboratory practice in Africa and her group contributes to antimicrobial resistance surveillance in Nigeria.

Susanna Dunachie is the Director of the NDM Centre for Global Health Research at University of Oxford, Professor of Infectious Diseases, and NIHR Global Research Professor. She is also an Honorary Consultant in Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases in the NHS. Her research programme focuses on developing vaccines for vulnerable populations, including defining immune correlates of protection for E. coli, Klebsiella species and B. pseudomallei (melioidosis). Since 2011 she has conducted collaborative research at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, Thailand and in 2019 was awarded a Hamied Foundation / Academy of Medical Sciences UK-India AMR Visiting Professorship.