Stephanie Lo

I am currently a bioinformatician for the Global Pneumococcal sequencing (GPS,  http://www.pneumogen.net/gps/) project. GPS is sequencing >20,000 pneumococcal isolates collected around the globe, especially from developing countries, to investigate the adaptive changes that mediate the emergence, expansion and persistence of pneumococcal lineages after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs). The project also aims to discover novel mechanisms by which the pneumococcus evades antimicrobials.

I have come from a clinical microbiology background and acquired my bioinformatic skills during my PhD when I investigated the transmission of epidemic plasmids harbouring genes conferring resistance to clinically important antibiotics such as cephalosporins (e.g. blaCTX-M), carbapenems (e.g. blaNDM, blaIMP, blaKPC), colisitin (e.g. mcr), fosfomycin (e.g. fosA3) and nitrofurantoin (e.g. oqxAB). I have a particular interest in understanding how mobile genetic element to spread antibiotic resistance genes and developing tools to predict antimicrobial susceptibility from whole-genome sequences that could potentially be applied in clinical laboratories.