London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Professor Gwen Knight's inaugural lecture will ask a deceptively simple question about antibiotic resistance: where do people actually acquire resistant bacteria? We can sequence a resistant organism down to the last gene, yet we rarely know how it reached the person carrying it or why the answer might be quite different for a young woman than for an elderly man. We know the bugs far better than we know the pathways. Gwen will argue that finding those pathways and their relative sizes is how we find the interventions. She will trace her work to try and find these pathways across three scales. At the bacterial scale: how does resistance move and what does carrying it cost? At the population scale: who acquires what and where, and what can be done about it in hospitals, the community, and during a pandemic? And at the global scale: how large is the burden, and in which populations? Do men get more drug-resistant infections than women, and what might that tell us about intervening across the life course? 

Along the way, Gwen will follow her own route from maths at Oxford to a microbiology lab bench in a south London hospital, to TB vaccines, COVID-19 transmission in English hospitals, and on to the epidemiology of resistance at LSHTM. Each turn brought collaborations and interdisciplinary skills that shape how she works today to better understand antibiotic resistance. This is a tale with many stops, and at each one a mathematical model that drew in people from all kinds of disciplines - microbiologists, clinicians, economists, social scientists, policymakers. They are what has made the journey possible, and so enjoyable. Gwen will close with the argument that no one field can answer the question she began with. Modelling gives a framework to bring the pieces together and, potentially, to work out not just where resistance comes from, but what to do about it.

The lecture will take place from 17:30 - 18:30, followed by a 1-hour in-person drinks reception in the Pumphandle Social.

Speaker

Professor Gwen Knight

Gwen Knight is a Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. From a background in mathematics, Gwen works as an interdisciplinary scientist, combining microbiology and epidemiology within mathematical models of antibiotic resistance. She has a PhD from UCL, and has worked at Imperial College London, being based at LSHTM since 2017.

Event notices

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