Hannah McDonald

Hannah’s area of interest lies within searching for new antibiotic compounds for human pathogens such as MRSA and VRE.

This interest stems from her time at University of Birmingham where she undertook her undergrad and masters degrees working on new targets for tuberculosis drugs.

She now works in Professor Barrie Wilkinson’s group, where her research topic is looking into molecules from nature and how we can utilise these for new antibiotics.

Hannah works on a bacterial species called Streptomyces formicae which is a soil dwelling bacterium that produces many new compounds of interest.

This research is of great importance due to the increase in antibiotic resistance that we are seeing today and therefore the aim is to shed some light on the compounds that this particular strain produces.