CIR Seminar: Dr Ewan Harrison

** please remember attendance at these seminars is compulsory for all students registered in the CIR as part of your continued development and educational training**

“Unpicking the biology of Staphylococcus aureus nasal colonisation”

Dr Ewan Harrison, Head of the Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative, Wellcome Sanger Institute

Dr Harrison webpage

Host: Dr Clark Russell

Bio:

I was fascinated with microbes from a young age, but my passion for investigating infectious diseases was truly ignited when I read Paul de Krieff’s classic book ‘Microbe Hunters’ during my undergraduate studies. The more I read about the origins of HIV, Ebola and Marburg, about bacterial pathogens and antibiotic resistance, the more I wanted to know.

I initially started out working for the Health Protection Agency (now the UK Health Security Agency), testing vaccine candidates to protect against the bacteria that cause meningitis. But it quickly became apparent that I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of the biological phenomena that we were seeing in the lab and so I became a PhD student at the University of Leicester. There I used genomics to understand the mechanisms underpinning evolution and pathogenesis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, with a particular focus on genomics. I then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge employing genomics to track methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus transmission between humans and animals, and then in hospitals and the community. As part of this work, I also used genomics understand how Staphylococcus aureus develops antimicrobial resistance and to uncover novel susceptibilities.

In 2018, I joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute as part of the Health Data Research UK (HDR-UK) substantive site on a UKRI Fellowship to investigate the biological basis of persistent nasal colonisation by S. aureus, a complex and long-standing problem. This required me to take a multidisciplinary approach combining sampling large cohorts of blood donors using microbiology, electronic health data, host genetics and microbiome studies.

In all my studies I have been keen to ensure that my academic research delivers actionable insights for public health, and that the discoveries made from large-scale in silico data lead to hypotheses that can then be investigated in the laboratory. These approaches proved particularly valuable when I became part of the leadership team, and ultimately the Deputy Director, for COG-UK. The consortium brought together academics, public health agencies and clinical partners to deliver genomic surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 on a previously unimaginable scale. My experiences in this pioneering endeavour reinforced the value of collaboration across range of specialisms (experimental, computational, clinical or theoretical) to develop and deliver new science. For this reason, the Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative has collaboration and networking built into its core.