Quantitative approaches to antimicrobial resistance

20-21 July
Edinburgh, EICC
Workshop Chairs: Prof Jamie Hobbs and Dr Rosalind Allen

This meeting is part of a a series of Focused Workshops delivered through the EPSRC NetworkPlus in ‘Understanding the Physics of Life 2’.

Workshop overview:
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been described by Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, as a “Threat to humanity on a par with climate change”. It is an area that has recently received an injection of funds through a number of cross-council calls in the UK, and is a priority in the delivery plan of MRC, BBSRC and EPSRC. As such, AMR is a highly topical area that has a growing biophysics community across a range of areas from instrumentation for interrogating living bacteria and their interaction with the host, to the application of statistical physics to the development of resistance genes.
In the previous PoL bacteria, infection and biofilms formed the focus of successful workshops and it was clear that there is a growing biological physics community in these areas with strong existing networks spanning into biology. This workshop aims to consolidate some of those links, to build new ones, and to bring focus to bare on a clear societal challenge.

Purpose

The aim of the workshop is to bring scientists physical scientists (physics, biophysics) and biologists together in the area of AMR to bridge gaps, discuss research in this area and address some of the below key questions: 

How does antimicrobial resistance evolve in bacteria?
What is the impact of antimicrobial stress on bacterial evolution?
What are the physical impacts of antimicrobials on bacteria – i.e. how are bacteria killed by antimicrobials and how is this impacted upon by resistance? 
How can this understanding be used in the development of new antimicrobial approaches?

Who should attend?

We invite participation by academic, industrial and clinical scientists in the UK who are interested in the central goal of generating new collaborative research interactions at the physical/life sciences interface focussed on this subject area. 

Programme

Confirmed speakers:

Terence Hwa (UCSD)
Natalie Balabhan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Bob Austin (Princeton)
Vernita Gordon (UT Austin)
Berenike Maier (Koeln)
Tobias Bollenbach (IST, Austria)
Jeremy Webb (Southampton)
Mark Leake (York)
Simon Foster (Sheffield)
Liz Sockett (Nottingham)

Registration

Abstract submission deadline: 27 June 2017. Registration deadline: 6 July 2017

Directions

The meeting will take place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, following on from the 2017 IUPAB/EBSA congress. Maps and directions.