SLAS Visiting Graduate Researcher Program Grant Recipient Announced

Thi Mui Pham of the University Medical Center Utrecht Named 2020 SLAS Visiting Graduate Researcher Program Grant Recipient

Oak Brook, IL (USA) — The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) selected Thi Mui Pham, Ph.D., of the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center - Utrecht (Utrecht, Netherlands) as its 2020 SLAS Visiting Graduate Researcher Grant recipient.

This grant will provide a stipend to cover Pham’s expenses as she begins her visiting researcher position at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Medicine (Oxford, United Kingdom). Pham will work with Ben Cooper, Ph.D., Head of the Epidemic Modelling and Policy Evaluation Unit (EMPAU) to integrate antibiograms with epidemiological data to analyze pathogen transmissions within hospitals. Antibiograms are overall profiles of antimicrobial susceptibility testing results that show how susceptible strains of bacteria are to a variety of antibiotics. Cooper and Pham will assess whether such data can aid in reconstructing who-infected-whom in intensive-care units.

“We will investigate whether such data can aid in the reconstruction of transmission trees of bacterial colonization in [intensive care units] ICUs. The ideas and methods developed here may pave the way to further integrate genetic sequences with epidemiological nosocomial data in the future,” says Pham. “Also, given the current COVID-19 pandemic, I will be working on developing mathematical models related to COVID-19.”

The SLAS Visiting Graduate Researcher Grant Program is awarded to one North American or European degree-seeking graduate student each year. The winner conducts short-term doctoral research or participates in a mentored or independent research project with a faculty member at a different host institution.

The SLAS Grant Program was introduced in 2015 to facilitate educational opportunities for outstanding students pursuing graduate degrees related to quantitative biosciences and/or life sciences R&D. This program helps to realize a fundamental tenet of SLAS’s mission: to advance the fields of laboratory science and technology by nurturing the next generation of professional scientists. The application period for the 2021 SLAS Visiting Graduate Researcher Grant runs from August through December 2020.

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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international community of 16,000 professionals and students dedicated to life sciences discovery and technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS publishes two peer-reviewed and MEDLINE-indexed scientific journals, SLAS Discovery and SLAS Technology. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit www.slas.org/publications/slas-technology/ and www.slas.org/publications/slas-discovery/.

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