Marco Galardini
01 July 2025
Yesterday we had the great pleasure to see not only one, but two of our students defending their PhD dissertations!
We started off with Judit, who focused on the use of large genome collections to study the transmission of bacterial pathogens
in the clinic and on methods to improve current practices for genomic epidemiology. She sustained a rather long Q&A session
from her examiners: Conor Meehan and
Dirk Schlüter.
Then it was time for Hannes to talk about his work on using k-mer based methods to improve the interpretability of bacterial
GWAS and aid the design of antimicrobials based on antisense oligonucleotides (i.e. asobiotics), using very large genome collections.
He had to contend with a similarly though Q&A session from his examiners:
Franziska Faber and
Daniel Depledge, who is by now a regular examiner for our PhD students.
After a delicious BBQ organized at our department by them, we headed back to MHH for the graduation ceremony, where we had a pleasant surprise:
Judit won the “Infection Biology Prize” for her thesis, which comes with a cool check for 1000 Euros!
Thanks to both for their very hard work and lovely day of celebrations!