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What will we cover over the next three weeks and who are your educators?

Content of the weeks to come and meet you educators

What are the next three weeks about?

In Week 1 of the course, you will have an opportunity to refresh the basic mechanisms of Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how we link genotype and phenotype data together. We will discuss cases where this is easy and where this is more complex.

After you understand the fundamentals of AMR in Week 1, in Week 2 we will proceed by looking into the main online databases which house AMR data, namely NCBI, CARD and ResFinder. You’ll understand how they are used and how to interpret and compare their outputs.

In Week 3, following a good understanding of the pros and cons for the databases and associated tools covered in Week 2, you will proceed with learning how to contribute your own data to these databases using open research principles. You should then be able to use your predictions for future studies, such as epidemiology and correlations, in your own context.

Meet your Educators

We, your Educators on this course, will be present during the next three weeks of the course, following and joining in the discussions from time to time and sharing our expertise with you. On this journey together, we will be helping each other to learn. We will also be looking at your feedback, which will serve to improve the course.

At the end of each week, we provide a written summary of the week’s learning. We will also email you with a round-up of the week’s learning. We are looking forward to learning with you.

Conor Meehan

Lead Educator

Conor is an Associate Professor in Microbial Bioinformatics, specialising in the molecular epidemiology of bacterial pathogens and the evolution of microbiomes. They are a member of the Royal Society of Biology and a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority.

Conor has over 10 years experience in microbial bioinformatics, genomics and evolution. He holds a B.Sc. in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from Maynooth University and a Ph.D. in HIV drug resistance and transmission from NUI Galway. Prior to joining NTU, they were a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada (2011-2014) and a research fellow at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium (2014-2019; still holds an honorary professor position) and an assistant professor of molecular microbiology at the University of Bradford (2019-2021).

Jane Hawkey

Educator

Jane obtained her PhD in microbial genomics from the University of Melbourne, where she studied how bacterial transposases impact the evolution of various bacterial pathogens. She is currently a research fellow at Monash University in the Infectious Disease Genomics @ Alfred group, where she co-leads the Translational Microbial Genomics program. Jane’s current work focuses on developing tools and methods to better understand AMR mechanisms and its epidemiology in the hospital setting, with the overarching goal for these tools to be implemented by our clinical partners.

Kristy Horan

Educator

Kristy is a Lead Bioinformatician at AusTrakka platform. She has a keen interest in translational AMR genomics and developing tools to deliver results that are actionable in a public and clinical health setting.

Dusanka Nikolic

Education Developer

Dusanka’s background is both in Computer Science and Education. In her present role as Senior Education Developer, Dusanka focuses on research-based design and development of MOOCs within the Wellcome Connecting Science (WCS) digital learning programme. She coordinates, leads and co-leads teams of experts, developers and educators on the online courses, providing pedagogical guidance and mentorship.

Dusanka develops interactive exercises for the online courses to enhance online learning of subjects typically taught face-to-face. She also has a lot of experience designing and teaching education modules in Wellcome Connecting Science courses.

© Wellcome Connecting Science
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Antimicrobial Databases and Genotype Prediction: Data Sharing and Analysis

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