BacPath 14 Speakers

Professor Ruth Hall
The University of Sydney, Australia

Ruth Hall obtained her B.Sc (Hons) at the University of Sydney and a PhD in Molecular Biology from Edinburgh University. On returning to Australia, she was a Lecturer in Biochemistry at Monash University, and after short stints at ANU and then the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland, she held a research position in CSIRO for over 20 years, rising to Chief research scientist before being made redundant. In 2003, she began re-building a research group at the University of Sydney, where she remains. She held an NHMRC Senior Principal Fellowship from 2005-2011. In recognition of her discovery and characterisation of the gene cassette/integron system, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA) in 2005 and Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2010. She was the Australian Society for Microbiology Rubbo Orator in 2004, and in 2005 won the American Society for Microbiology Sanofi-Aventis Award for research in the field of antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy. In 2012, she was awarded the AAS MacFarlane Burnet Medal and Lecture. In 2014, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for contributions to Microbiology. Ruth has long-standing and ongoing research interests in the acquisition of antimicrobial resistance by Gram-negative bacteria (Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica and Acinetobacter baumannii) with a focus on the mobile genetic elements, gene cassettes/integrons, transposons and insertion sequences, plasmids and integrative elements, and the mechanisms involved in their movement. 

Professor Tim Mitchell
University of Birmingham, UK

Tim Mitchell qualified with a BSc in Biological Sciences (Microbiology) from the University of Birmingham in 1983. He was awarded a PhD from the same University in 1986 for his studies on the role of Toxin A in the pathophysiology of disease caused by Clostridium difficile. He obtained a Wellcome Trust Fellowship and spent a year at Erasmus University in Rotterdam studying the effects of bacterial toxins of host cell signaling pathways. He then returned to the UK as a post-doctoral researcher and then Wellcome Trust Fellow at University of Leicester where he learned molecular biology under the tutelage of Graham Boulnois. In 1992 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and in 1996 moved to the University of Glasgow where he was appointed to the Chair of Microbiology. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2004. In 2012 he returned to the University of Birmingham as Professor of Microbial Infection and Immunity. His research is focused on understanding the mechanisms by which bacteria cause disease, in particular the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae and its interaction with host immune system. These studies are aimed at the development of vaccines and therapeutic approaches to prevent and treat bacterial pneumonia and meningitis.

Professor Shelley Payne
Universtity of Texas, USA

Shelley Payne is Professor of Molecular Biosciences and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her undergraduate degree from Rice University and PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She was a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow with Bruce Ames at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on the genetics and regulation of virulence factors of human intestinal pathogens, including Vibrio cholerae and Shigella spp. She has studied iron transport systems in these species and has shown that successful competition with the host for iron and regulation of virulence factors by iron are important in establishing bacterial infections in the human. Recently, her lab has focused on signals in addition to iron limitation that trigger virulence gene expression in the host.  Their work has shown that metabolites and regulators of central carbon metabolism play important roles in controlling the expression of genes required for colonization of the host.

Shelley is on several editorial boards for scientific journals and is an editor of the ASM journal Infection and Immunity. She has served on grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.  She was a member of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Council and currently serves on an NIH review panel.  She is a former member and chair of the ASM Committee on Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, and in 2014, she received the ASM Graduate Education Award.

Professor William Shafer
Emory University School of Medicine, USA

Professor William M. Shafer (Ph.D. degree from Kansas State University [1979] and NRSA post-doctoral fellow at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Medicine [1979-1982]) has been on the Emory School of Medicine faculty since 1982 as a member of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He has been continuously funded for the past 33 years for his work on antibiotic resistance and bacterial pathogenesis and currently holds a 10 year NIH MERIT Award. He is also a recipient of a Senior Research Career Scientist Award from the VA Medical Research Service. The Shafer laboratory is engaged in research dealing with the mechanisms by which Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the causative agent of the sexually transmitted infection termed gonorrhoea, develops resistance to antibiotics used in therapy and how this strict human pathogen evades host defences. He has published over 150 manuscripts, reviews and book chapters as well as training numerous Ph.D. and post-doctoral fellows during his career.

Dr Thomas Kehl-Fie
University of Illinois, USA

Dr Thomas Kehl-Fie is an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is internationally known for his work on nutritional immunity and the manganese and zinc sequestering innate immune effector calprotectin. His work with Staphylococcus aureus helped establish that the host restricts the availability of these essential metals at sites of infection and that this sequestration inactivates metal-dependent bacterial enzymes. Ongoing work in the Kehl-Fie laboratory is focused on elucidating the adaptations that enable S. aureus, and other successful pathogens, to overcome nutritional immunity and cause disease.

Dr Jason Rosch
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA

Dr Jason Rosch is an Assistant Member in the Department of Infectious Diseases at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He received his undergraduate degree in biology from the College of Wooster in Ohio and subsequently received his PhD from Washington University in St Louis in Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis investigating streptococcal secretion systems under the guidance of Dr Michael Caparon. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr Elaine Tuomanen at St Jude Children’s Hospital investigating metal homeostasis pathways and virulence mechanisms of Streptococcus pneumoniae. His research group has a focus on host-pathogen interactions with a specific interest in the pneumococcus and high-risk host model systems. His lab uses both genetics and infection models to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial mucosal and invasive disease. With these insights, his lab hopes to develop novel therapeutic strategies from the insights gained from such modelling.