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Meet Alice Collins – a microbiology graduate

Alice, a microbiology graduate explains the highlights of her degree including a field trip to Columbia.
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My name is Alice Collins. And I’m a final year microbiology student at the University of Reading. I’m very much interested in antibiotic resistance, which I’m actually continuing on now. I’m going to do a masters of research studying antibiotic resistance in cystic fibrosis patients and looking at new therapeutic drugs against Pseudomonas aeruginosa and burkholderia cepacia. Well, my undergraduate dissertation was actually on how rifampicin, which is an antibiotic. It’s exposure to E.coli actually changes the microbial behaviour, such as how it persists in the environment and how it infects humans. Last summer, I went on a trip to Colombia, which is in South America. Our research took us to the rainforest, which was in the north of the department, called Uribia.
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My favourite part was definitely the rainforest trek because we got to see some things, such as a howler monkey and a sloth. The Colombia trip is something that I will always remember. It’s something that’s a completely invaluable lesson to learn about working with researchers from other countries. And just being in the rainforest, being somewhere in South America and being surrounded by all of their culture and their wildlife, as well as studying the microbial. So I think that it’s really important that you research into what areas of biology you’re most interested in, because biology is a massive field and has many different aspects.

In this video you’ll meet Alice Collins, a Microbiology graduate from the University of Reading. In this video, Alice describes the opportunity she had to study at a research centre in the middle of the rainforest on a fieldwork trip to Colombia and explains why this was a particular highlight of her degree.

You can read these blog posts written by students who joined this annual trip in 2016.

Since studying at the University of Reading, Alice is now studying for a Master of Research at Cardiff University and would like to pursue a career in microbiology researching ways to combat antimicrobial resistant infections.

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