Modelling Antimicrobial Resistance (360G-Wellcome-206979_Z_17_Z)

The Vacation-Scholarship project will develop and explore mechanistic mathematical models relevant to antimicrobial resistance within a bacterial population. Specifically, the regulation of efflux-pump expression, antibiotic uptake and the competition between resistant and susceptible strains within a population will each be modelled and the models integrated to investigate computationally the potential efficacy of combined treatments involving efflux inhibitors as well as antibiotics. The work will focus on multiscale ordinary-differential-equation formulations, but will also involve limited partial-differential-equation investigations of spatial effects. The goals of the work are thus to gain insight into the effectiveness of efflux-inhibitors/antibiotics combinations in mitigating resistance, to provide further evidence for the applicability of modern mathematical methods in such contexts and to introduce the student to systems-biology approaches as applied in the study of a crucial area of healthcare.