Congratulations Anna!

Congratulations to Dr Anna Barnard, who has been awarded a Sir Henry Dale fellowship. This 5-year fellowship is jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society and aims to support researchers on their route to becoming independent group leaders.  Anna will be the first holder of this fellowship in the Department of Chemistry.

Anna’s fellowship project, which will begin in April 2019, is entitled ‘Mimicking Protein-Protein Interactions in Persistent Bacteria: A Chemical Biology Approach to Targeting Recurrent Infection’. The resistance and tolerance of bacteria to antibiotics is one of the biggest challenges facing the modern world.  One way in which bacteria survive in the presence of antibiotics is to generate small populations of non-growing cells called persisters.  Anna’s project aims to reverse the formation of persisters in bacteria and restore their sensitivity to antibiotics. The project will be in collaboration with Dr Sophie Helaine in the Department of Medicine.

Anna is currently a Junior Research fellow in the Department of Chemistry and the Insitute of Chemical Biology and her JRF is sponsored by Professor Ed Tate at Imperial and Tony Holder at the Francis Crick Institute You can find out more about research in the Barnard group here.