Departure, on promotion, of Dr Katarina Oravcova

kr16
Tuesday 14 February 2017

2017-01-30-Katarina-sequencer-3 (002)-K1024The School of Medicine is delighted that Dr Katarina Oravcova has been selected for a Lectureship at the College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow, sad to see her go but glad that the 6 years she spent in St Andrews has prepared her so well for such a positive promotion.  Katarina Oravcova joined the School of Medicine in November 2010 as a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof Gillespie’s group and studied the evolution of antimicrobial resistance under selective pressure and its impact on bacterial fitness.  As the Category 3 laboratory at the North Haugh was established she transitioned her research focus on Mycobacterium tuberculosis where she studied two aspects of tuberculosis, the involvement of lipid bodies in TB dormancy and development of molecular tools to monitor response to drug treatment.  Her interest in bacterial genomics and growing collaboration with clinical partners led her to establish next generation sequencing workstation in the Infection Group lab.  As she became increasingly involved in genomic research she joined Prof Holden’s group where her research interests focussed on investigation of transmissions and outbreaks of hospital acquired infections.  This exciting project enabled her to see the whole picture, from individual cases to outbreak confirmation or exclusion.  Her contribution was in the wet lab side as well as the bioinformatics data analysis, and then utilizing the genomic data to understand the evolution of microorganisms.  During her 6 year stay in St Andrews she was involved in supervision and teaching in different forms with a highlight of teaching every year at a Wellcome Trust Advanced Course Genomics and Clinical Microbiology.  As a molecular microbiologist she is interested in bacterial genomics, antimicrobial resistance and the role human and animal hosts play in infection transmission.  She is also very keen on developing new sequencing approaches.  She will be working on some of these interests in her new lectureship position at the College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow as well as setting up a new Masters course at Glasgow.

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