EMBARK Spring Webinars

EMBARK is starting a webinar series where invited speakers will be presenting their research and be contrasted to EMBARK members presenting the work performed in the project. This will be followed by a discussion and Q&A. All the webinars, except for one, will take place at 14:00 CEST.

Four webinars will take place before the summer break:

  • April 28: Gerry Wright – “Approaches to measure and monitor AMR in various environments”
    Luis Pedro Coelho – “Quantifying AMR at very large scales”
    [Register]
  • May 19: Heike Schmitt – “International efforts for One Health surveillance of AMR (WHO Tricycle)”
    Etienne Ruppé – “On the use of Tricycle in EMBARK”
    [Register]
  • June 9: Dearbháile Morris – “What lurks beneath: the role of water in the transmission and persistence of AMR”
    Rabaab Zahra – “E. coli STs and Resistance Mechanisms in Sewage from Islamabad”
    [Register]
  • June 30 **13:00 CEST*: Kimberly Kline – “Pathogenesis and persistence during Enterococcus faecalis biofilm-associated infection”
    Sofia Forslund – High-throughput measurement of host and microbiota
    [Register]

Here is also a sneak peek at the first webinars of the fall:

  • September 1: Amy Pruden – “Towards coordinated local and global surveillance of antibiotic resistance at wastewater treatment plants”
    Thomas Berendonk – “AMR in WWTPs – the European perspective”
  • September 22: Gautam Dantas – “Predicting and Combating Biotic and Abiotic Perturbations to Diverse Microbiomes”
    Johan Bengtsson-Palme – “Antibiotic perturbations to interactions in microbial communities”
  • October 13: Barry McMahon – “How AMR in wildlife can inform zoonoses research”
    Victor Hugo Jarquin Diaz – “AMR spread in rodents”

Luis Pedro Coelho on building a research group in China

EMBARK PI Luis Pedro Coelho recently wrote a perspective piece in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology on starting up a research group in China and the specific and general problems he and other young PIs are facing. Well worth a read if you are curious on scientific diversity, and it also highlights a few of the challenges with large international collaborations, just in terms of sheer administration!

Coronavirus-related setbacks

Unfortunately, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is impacting some of the EMBARK communications and outreach as well, and I regret to inform you that today’s meeting with on NordicMappingAMR arranged by the Swedish Medical Products Agency where we would have presented and discussed EMBARK has been cancelled and postponed until after the summer.

Similarly, the workshop and seminar on monitoring of antibiotic resistance in the environment organized by Resistomap and others that was to take place in late April in Helsinki, and where EMBARK was going to be presented, has also been postponed until August.

Finally, the team is discussing how to best proceed with e.g. sampling strategies in the time of lockdowns and travel restrictions. We are still working on this, but at this point this only looks like it will delay portions of the program, and not have major impacts on the research activities. This analysis may of course change depending on how the COVID-19 outbreak develops.

Open Postdoc Position Coelho Lab

The Coelho lab is hiring a postdoc to work with understand antimicrobial resistance trends in public metagenome databases directly connected to the EMBARK program. The work is mostly computational, but there can also be some field and lab work (collecting samples).

As all EMBARK positions, this postdoc project will be performed n collaboration with the rest of the EMBARK team, so if your current skill set doesn’t include all of this, but you are interested in the position, then do apply! This position is open until being filled, so send your application as soon as possible.

The lab looks for a candidate with a strong background (including graduate work) in either computational biology or microbiology. If you feel that you are the right person for this position, you can apply hereTo apply: send an email to luispedro@big-data-biology.org with your CV (preferably without a photo) and one representative publication. Later in the process, you will be asked for two reference letters, but they are not necessary for the initial application.

More information is available here: http://big-data-biology.org/positions/pd-embark/