Meet Alice Collins – a microbiology graduate

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.

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.