The IRIS Initiative investigates changes in invasive disease during COVID-19

The IRIS Initiative investigates changes in invasive disease in 26 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prof Brueggemann has worked at the University of Oxford since 2000 across four different departments and two colleges, initially as a DPhil student and then progressing through several research fellowships and teaching posts. She also worked at Imperial College London for two years and joined her current Oxford department and the Big Data Institute in 2019. Prof Brueggemann currently sits on a vaccines and antimicrobial resistance advisory group at the World Health Organisation and is the secretary of the ISPPD scientific society. The Brueggemann research group analyses thousands of bacterial genomes to better understand diseases like meningitis and pneumonia, and the impact of vaccination and antimicrobial resistance. Current research projects are focused on IRIS, a large international consortium of laboratories investigating the impact of COVID-19 on bacterial invasive disease; bacteriocin peptides that might have potential as novel antimicrobials; bacteriophages and pneumococcal disease; and the diagnosis of meningitis in Africa. A central component of the research includes making genomic data and analysis tools freely accessible to the international community through a large suite of databases in PubMLST.

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