Emma Rossiter

Emma is a NERC GW4+ PhD candidate, under the supervision of Dr Aimee Murray, Professor Will Gaze, Professor Angus Buckling, Dr April Hayes and Professor Mario Recker at the University of Exeter, alongside Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern at The University of Bath and Senior Research Scientist at the Environment Agency, Dr Wiebke Schmidt. 

Her PhD project: Evaluating the combined effects of environmental pollutants on the evolution of antimicrobial resistance, focuses on examining the effects of complex pollutant mixtures at environmentally relevant concentrations on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) within bacterial communities. Additionally, it aims to understand how the physiochemical properties of compounds influence their antimicrobial potential and the contribution of pH to antibiotic efficacy. 

Emma completed her four-year B.A. Honours bachelor’s degree in Biological and Biomedical Sciences, at Trinity College Dublin, in her home country of Ireland. During her final two years of study, Emma specialised in Microbiology, at The Moyne Institute of Preventive Medicine. Emma’s capstone project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between The Moyne Institute and The Department of Engineering, at Trinity College Dublin. During this she created a methodology whereby attenuated strains of common pathogens, could be used to train a convolutional neural network, machine-learning (ML) algorithm.

Before joining the ECEHH and University of Exeter, Emma was a Research Assistant at Maynooth University, under the supervision of Professor Fiona Walsh, primarily as part of the research team for the ANTIVERSA consortium. The ANTIVERSA project consortium was a collaborative effort between spanning research institutions and government agencies spanning Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, Poland, Romania and Switzerland and investigated whether highly diverse aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems could prevent or delay the diffusion of AMR.

During this project, Emma contributed to the Irish soil microcosm experiments to track the dissemination of invading antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Enterococcus faecium and Escherichia coli and their genes across naturally occurring soil microbial communities. Emma also played a role in the data analysis for a project which profiled antibiotic resistance within the plumbing system of an Irish hospital during her time at Maynooth University.