World Antibiotic Awareness Week and EMBRACE

On 18th November 2016, EMBRACE organised its first joint seminar with SurreyCHAIR, associating the event with the World Antibiotic Awareness Week

On 18th November 2016, EMBRACE organised its first joint seminar with SurreyCHAIR, associating the event with the World Antibiotic Awareness Week, raising awareness as well as funds with the Great British Tea Party.

The guest reader was Professor Alasdair “Alex” Cook who is a veterinary epidemiologist with more than 25 years national and international experience in livestock animal health in Government, academic and development environments. Alex is a firm believer in a multi-disciplinary team approach to research, engaging with molecular biologists, microbiologists and socio-economists to name but a few. This idea brought both groups together and further collaboration is planned with a joint data visualisation workshop as well as a series of seminars/workshops on drug detection technology and devices; longitudinal study on education and AMR stewardship and economics and prescribing.

Our second reader of the day was Dr Caroline Colijn on “Bacterial Olympics: Competition and resistance”. She works with a broad aim to develop the mathematical tools to connect sequence data for pathogens to pathogen ecology. Caroline also has a long-standing interest on the dynamics of diverse interacting pathogens. Her group is building new approaches to analysing phylogenetic trees derived from pathogen sequence data, studying tree space and branching processes, and doing ecological and epidemiological modelling. 

After the presentations the attendees stayed for our charity bake sale and coffee morning, part of the Great British Tea Partyorganised to help Antibiotic Research UK to raise valuable funds for research, education and patient support. We raised over £120 and sold delicious cakes made for the event by members of our team.

The morning was highly successful in fulfilling our aims of raising awareness and funds to the World Antibiotic Awareness Week and also engaging with researchers from Surrey School of Veterinary Medicine, following an earlier meeting in July.