Department of Chemistry PhD student Elizabeth Holton received the award for her poster “Monitoring of antibiotics, pollutants, and AMR in formal and informal settlements: Back-calculation of antibiotic usage in the absence of prescription data”.
About winning the award she said: "I was honoured to win this award. SETAC is a leading global Society in the field of environmental science, and so it was a great opportunity to be able to showcase my research at their Europe conference this year."
When asked about her research Elizabeth added: "Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global topic, concerning the increasing pathogenic tolerance to antibiotics. Antibiotics are becoming less effective over time as microbes develop resistance to their mechanisms of attack. Therefore, it is important to understand how antibiotics are being prescribed and used within different communities, and how they behave once introduced into the environment."
Elizabeth is part of the ReNEW Research collaboration between the University of Bath and Stellenbosch University.
ReNEW is a global initiative, currently working to develop early warning systems for infectious disease. The team are performing a longitudinal monitoring campaign throughout Stellenbosch town, South Africa. This interdisciplinary collaboration is enabling us to observe important correlations, such as between chemical analyses (via mass spectrometry), and biological analyses (via metagenomics).
The SETAC Europe Awards Programme recognises and honours outstanding contributions to environmental sciences. The Awards were announced during the SETAC SciCon: SETACC Europe 30th Annual Meeting which was held virtually from 3-7 May 2020.