I am a PhD student at GELIFES at the University of Groningen since December 2018. My project is about the ecology and evolution of infectious ecosystems with a focus on bacterial interactions and antibiotic resistance development of bacteria from the urinary tract.

I started investigating bacterial interactions of urinary tract bacteria at the laboratory of Genetics at Wageningen University for my final thesis of my MSc degree. During my MSc I also worked on identifying a novel bacteriocin from Enterococcus species to inhibit the growth of pathogenic Enterococcus bacteria at the UMC Utrecht.

PhD project: Ecology and evolution of microbial infectious ecosystems

Polymicrobial infections can be viewed as ecosystems in which the community members interact. It is an open question how ecological interactions affect the evolution of the community members. We will address the role of these interactions on the evolution of the community members, and the development of antibiotic resistance. We will use polymicrobial urinary tract infections as a model system.