Meet the Team!

Introduction

While many have contributed to the development of SEDRI-LIMS, the core team is composed of individuals from a number of organisations.

Arcta Solutions is the company that has been developing the product with funding from the Wellcome Trust and under the guidance of a steering-group, again, composed of individuals from various relevant organisations.  The effort was first proposed by SEDRIC (Surveillance and Epidemiology of Drug-resistant Infections Consortium), a think-tank designed to bring together a range of international experts to share expertise and take action to tackle the gaps in drug-resistant infection surveillance and epidemiology.  Several members of SEDRIC are on the SEDRI-LIMS steering-group, most notably Professor Nick Feasey (SEDRIC chair), Professor Paul Turner (a long term advocate of this initiative) and Dr Ben Amos, who has been providing microbiology expertise to Arcta Solutions on a daily basis.

Profiles

Prof Nick Feasey - SEDRIC chair and Steering-Group member

Nick Feasey is a clinician academic and Professor of Microbiology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.  He is a consultant in medical microbiology and clinical infectious disease and he is based at the Wellcome Major Overseas Programme in Blantyre, Malawi, the “Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme” (MLW).

His research is focused on the surveillance and management of bacterial bloodstream infection and taking a one-health approach to exploring the transmission of enteric pathogens and associated antimicrobial resistance determinants using genomics, spatial statistics and transmission modelling in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and CHICAS at the University of Lancaster.

 

Prof Paul Turner - Director of COMRU and Steering-Group member

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Paul Turner is a clinical paediatric microbiologist and director of the Cambodia Oxford Medical Research Unit (COMRU), based at Angkor Hospital for Children, Siem Reap.  COMRU is a component of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, one of the Wellcome Africa and Asia Programmes.  He is Professor of Paediatric Microbiology at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford.

Paul leads research on pneumococcal colonisation and the nasopharyngeal microbiota, paediatric invasive bacterial infection epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).  He is the principal investigator of the ACORN Asia-Africa clinical AMR surveillance network and led development of the MICRO reporting framework for clinical microbiology data.  Paul’s non-research work focuses on capacity development for diagnostic microbiology in low-resource settings, in particular improving laboratory informatics for better local data utilisation.

 

Dr Ben Amos - Steering-Group member

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Ben Amos is a laboratory scientist specialising in clinical microbiology.  From 2002 to 2012 he ran the microbiology service in a district hospital in Tanzania.  Since returning to the UK he has worked on a number of projects supporting laboratories in lower income countries, including, since 2106, as a core team member for the Fleming Fund management agent.

For the SEDRI-LIMS project, Ben has been providing advice on clinical microbiology to the development team.

 

Matthew King - Director of Arcta Solutions

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Matt King is the founder and co-director of Arcta Solutions, a software house specialising in medical and health management systems and currently focused on the development of SEDRI-LIMS.

Prior to setting up Arcta Solutions (in 2017), Matt had a long career in telecoms, starting with 12 years of hardware and embedded software development in the (then) emerging videoconferencing industry, followed by 15 years at Cisco Systems where he led global development teams in the production of access management systems for enterprise and service provider networks.

Matt is the inventor or co-inventor of 6 US patents.

 

Mauro Tobin – COO of Software for Health Foundation and Steering-Group member

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Mauro Tobin is the Chief Operations Officer for the Software for Health Foundation and a digital health consultant specialising in mobilisation of health data and the creation of sustainable digital tools and services.  Mauro brings experiences from working in software developments with emerging technologies across a number of sectors, including finance and mobile telephony.  For the last 7 years he has been focussed on connected diagnostics and health data management, working for commercial organisations as well as with NGO’s such as the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND).

Mauro has developed and implemented AMR surveillance platforms in numerous LMIC’s including Zambia, Nepal and Kenya, and has used these experiences to spearhead the creation of the ‘AoS Health Initiative’ which is focussed on creating robust digital infrastructures for a number of disease verticals, including AMR.

 

Prof Susanna Dunachie – Steering-Group member

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Susanna Dunachie is a Professor of Infectious Diseases and NIHR Global Research Professor in the department of Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford, and works as an Honorary Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK.

Susanna leads research to improve therapies and vaccines for global infections including the neglected tropical disease melioidosis, other Gram-negative bacteria with antimicrobial resistance, tuberculosis and SARS-CoV-2. Her passion is working in international collaborations to strengthen laboratory research in low resource settings. She spent four years at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, Thailand and has ongoing research collaborations in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Kenya and USA. She was the Clinical Microbiologist to the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Study from 2018-2020 and in 2019 was awarded a Hamied Foundation / Academy of Medical Sciences Visiting Professorship to India.

 

Dr Raphael Sonabend – Technology Manager for Wellcome and Steering-Group member

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Raphael is part of the Data for Science and Health team at the Wellcome Trust and focuses on projects that make use of data science and technology that improve public health by reducing the burden of escalating and neglected infectious diseases.

Raphael has a background in machine learning for medical statistics and outside of Wellcome continues that research whilst being affiliated with Cambridge University, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, DFKI, and Imperial College London.

 

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