Ebenezer Foster-nyarko

Biography

Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko is a PhD student in Professor Mark Pallen’s group in the Quadrum Institute. His PhD research is focused on “Foodborne infection and the Microbial Ecology of the Vertebrate Gut”. This work is building on previous data on the gut microbiomes of chickens and guinea-fowl from the Gambia which I generated in Prof. Pallen’s lab in Warwick Medical School in 2016, published work from my supervisors’ labs, including access to novel sequencing platforms in Norwich (Oxford Nanopore in the O’Grady lab). He began my academic career in the University of Ghana where he read BSc in Biomedical Laboratory Sciences, majoring in Clinical Microbiology for my final year thesis. He also trained in Staffordshire University, UK for my MSc in Molecular Biology, and have over the past five years been involved in Invasive Bacterial Disease surveillance in Professor Martin Antonio’s lab in the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia (MRCG). In 2016 he was the lead Clinical Microbiologist in a team of experts from MRCG who provided technical assistance to the Ministry of Health in Ghana during the pneumococcal meningitis outbreak. He characterized for the first time during the outbreak, the strain of pneumococcus that was responsible for the outbreak (S. pneumoniae serotype 1).

Research Interest

Utilising clinical microbiological and molecular techniques to investigate the efficacy of novel as well as existing vaccines, antibiotic resistance and understanding the colonization of respiratory pathogens