Professor Will Gaze has over 15 years’ experience of antimicrobial resistance research in farmed and natural environments, including major elements of environmental sampling and wide-ranging analytical methodologies.
His research group consists of over 20 researchers funded by over £4 million in current and recent antimicrobial resistance (AMR) grants.
Current activity within Prof Gaze’s group covers fundamental issues of AMR evolution in the environment, using in situ and in vivo experiments, landscape scale dissemination of AMR and human exposure and transmission studies.
Projects are divided into three main themes: ecology, evolution and public health perspectives. These map onto those identified in successive WHO, EU and UK AMR action plans facilitating interdisciplinary research approaches and joined up thinking.
Prof Gaze has been invited to speak about AMR on 5 continents in the last 2 years and has advised UK and overseas governments, the United Nations Environment Programme, World Health Organisation, European Environment Agency, UK Environment Agency and Defra.
He was recently awarded a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship on “the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance: informing policy, regulation and practice”.
Further interdisciplinary work includes a large UK and Argentina AMR grant focusing on beef feed-lot production. This work integrates evidence synthesis, policy development, mathematical modelling, microbiology and evolutionary biology to produce a systems model of AMR.