Dr April Hayes is a microbiologist interested in the ecological and evolutionary aspects of adaptation of microbial communities to antibiotics.

April completed her PhD at the ECEHH, in the laboratories at the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter Penryn Campus, where she was investigating the effects of non-antibiotic drugs on bacterial communities. She was interested in how these pharmaceuticals may select for antimicrobial resistance. She was supervised by Dr Aimee Murray, Professor Will Gaze, and Dr Lihong Zhang from the ECEHH, alongside supervisors Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern and Professor Ed Feil from the University of Bath. April’s project was co-funded by Astra-Zeneca, and was supervised by Professor Jason Snape.

She completed her BSc at Lancaster University in Biomedicine, and moved to the University of Liverpool to complete an MSc in Microbiology. There, she worked on a research project to understand immune cell responses to bacterial isolates from lung infections, to start to understand why some infections become chronic in cystic fibrosis patients.