Category: DDLS

It’s been a busy couple of days at the DDLS Annual Meeting, so I did not have the time to post about this exciting news yesterday, but it is very exciting nonetheless.

I have been selected by the board of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as the 2022 recipient of the Einhorn SIGHT award. The award recognizes outstanding global health research work by young researchers in the context of low- and middle-income countries, and specifically I have been selected thanks to my “outstanding research and development of tools to limit the global challenge of infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance.”

In a global health context, what is particularly important in the coming years is improved access to clean water and sewage systems. In addition, we also need to develop data-driven systems that can be used to implement easy-to-handle, inexpensive early warning systems and risk models for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which we hope will be the outcome of the EMBARK program.

Clearly, a large part of this is the result of the work the entire EMBARK team has put together in the past couple of years. Another big part has been the work I have done together with Joakim Larsson in the area of antibiotic resistance in the environment. I am deeply grateful both to Joakim and my EMBARK collaborators for their contributions towards this award. Science is a teamwork, and it is a bit of a pity that we celebrate individuals to the extent we do (even though the recognition of my contribution of course is nice for me personally). Thanks to everyone who have been involved over the years!

There will be an award ceremony at the Royal Academy of Sciences on November 22, as part of a very nice event on Global Health, with the theme ‘Food Safety in conflict’. You can read a short interview I did in relation to the award here.

In other notes, I was also selected as one of Clarivate as one of this year’s Highly Cited Researchers (for the third year in a row!) This is of course also exciting news, although the most important aspect of that is that it shows that the research we do is useful to others!

I will be giving talks on data driven life science – specifically on antibiotic resistance and pathogenicity – on two different events organised within the Data Driven Life Science program (DDLS) in the next month. First up is on the DDLS Annual Conference, coming up already next week (15-16 November). Here, I will give a talk on the evolution of pathogenicity, outlining some of our ongoing work towards finding novel virulence factors. There will also be talk from the other DDLS fellows, as well as Samuli Ripatti and Cecilia Clementi.

On-site registration closes on November 9 so make sure to grab one of the last spots at this exciting event! Register here – online attendance is also possible for those who don’t want to travel to Stockholm.

Then in December, I will be talking at the Data-driven Epidemiology and biology of infections Research Area Symposium in Gothenburg on how to predict the disease threats of the future. This symposium takes place in Gothenburg on December 7 to 8, but again online participation is also possible. Aside from me, Nicholas Croucher will talk about genomic surveillance data and bacterial epidemiology, Bill Hanage will talk about decisions in an imperfect world and Tove Fall will talk about dynamic disease surveillance. There will also be talks about the new DDLS fellows in epidemiology and infection biology, which is what I am perhaps most excited about: Thomas van Boeckel, Luisa Hugerth and Laura Carroll! It seems like registration has not yet opened for this event, but keep monitoring this site.

I look forward to see you at these events!