Emma is a NERC GW4+ PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr. Aimee Murray, Professor Will Gaze, Professor Angus Buckling, Dr. April Hayes, and Professor Mario Recker at the University of Exeter, alongside Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern at the University of Bath and Dr. Wiebke Schmidt, a Senior Research Scientist at the Environment Agency.

Emma is interested in how complex pollutant mixtures influence antimicrobial resistance in an environmental context and how the physicochemical properties of compounds affect their antimicrobial potential.

Her PhD project, titled Evaluating the Combined Effects of Environmental Pollutants on the Evolution of Antimicrobial Resistance, focuses on assessing how complex pollutant mixtures at environmentally relevant concentrations influence antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacterial communities. Additionally, her research aims to understand how the physicochemical properties of compounds affect their antimicrobial potential and the role of pH in antibiotic efficacy.

Emma completed a four-year B.A. Honours degree in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Trinity College Dublin in her home country, Ireland. During her final two years, she specialized in Microbiology at The Moyne Institute of Preventive Medicine. Her capstone project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between The Moyne Institute and the Department of Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, where she developed a methodology to train a convolutional neural network (a type of machine-learning algorithm) to recognise pathogens based on colony morphology, using attenuated strains of common pathogens.

Before joining the ECEHH and the University of Exeter, Emma worked as a Research Assistant at Maynooth University under the supervision of Professor Fiona Walsh, primarily contributing to the ANTIVERSA project consortium. This collaborative initiative included research institutions and government agencies from Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland, aiming to investigate whether highly diverse aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems could prevent or delay the spread of AMR.

At Maynooth University, Emma contributed to Irish soil microcosm experiments to track the dissemination of invading antibiotic-resistant bacteria and their genes, across natural soil microbial communities. She also contributed to data analysis for a project profiling antibiotic resistance in the plumbing system of an Irish hospital.

Emma will be at the ECEHH from 2023 to 2027.