Melinda M Ashcroft Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2019

Melinda M Ashcroft

Mid-way through her Masters degree in Biotechnology, Melinda realised that it was possible to combine her two passions, computers and biology. In 2019 Melinda was awarded her PhD in Microbial Genomics, which focused on the roles of Mobile Genetic Elements, antimicrobial resistance and DNA methylation in the evolution of extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli lineages. During her PhD, she won several awards including the prestigious Australian Society for Microbiology student travel award (2017). Melinda is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Computational Microbiologist at Monash University, with a special interest in infectious Disease Genomics. Her current research focuses on characterising surface capsule and lipopolysaccharide loci in Klebsiella and defining the sero-epidemiology of Klebsiella lineages. Since starting as a postdoc in 2019, Melinda has won 2 early career research awards, presented her work at several national microbiology and sexual health conferences and in 2021 was awarded a University of Melbourne Early Career Researchers Grant for her work on the genomic epidemiology of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. As an ASM communications ambassador since 2017 (Twitter: @AUSSOCMIC and @BioMinnie), Melinda's interests also include blogging and science communication.