Denise Tago is an African fellow from Côte d'Ivoire. She holds a certificate of training in audio visual journalism and a certificate of mobile journalism from the media school "Studio Mozaik" in Côte d'Ivoire. Denise has worked as a presenter, reporter and editor for television and web radio. She has participated in programmes on health, youth and politics as a reporter namely

- IYF World Youth Camp in South Korea in 2016

- volunteer doctor programme for Buruli ulcer patients initiated by the NGO IYF in 2019

- awareness caravan for peaceful legislative elections (youth spirit, peace spirit) in Côte d'Ivoire initiated by Studio Mozaik in 2021.

Denise joined the MEVacP project team as a communication assistant, she was in charge of ensuring the visibility of some of the project's activities on social networks, creating content for the website in order to raise awareness among the different targets and contributing to the popularisation of the tools created.

I am a Catalan student with a background in BSc. Biology. I did my MSc. thesis working with VLPs in Prof. Martin Bachmann’s lab and I am currently undertaking a DPhil in Mexico where I study the resistome and biofilm formation of highly resistant Acinetobacter baumannii isolates both phenotypically and genotypically.

My previous educational background includes a medical doctor and a master’s in biomedical science, concentrating in molecular biology and genetics. Through my education and work, I gained interest and experience in antimicrobial resistance and molecular epidemiology of bacterial pathogens causing respiratory and invasive diseases, especially meningitis and sepsis, such as Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae. I am currently undertaking a DPhil where I will be studying the population genetics of Haemophilus influenzae in Indonesian population in order to study the vaccination impact as well as to find an improved vaccination and point-of-care diagnostic strategy in the future.

I’m a postdoctoral researcher investigating the antimicrobial capability of protein antibiotics. After obtaining my BSc in Biomedical Science I decided to pursue a career in microbiology and worked as a Research Assistant at University College London. There I investigated the antimicrobial activity of photodynamic therapy and novel catheters embedded with light activated antimicrobials. I then undertook a PhD at the University of East Anglia where I used high-throughput phenomics to link genotype and phenotype, to study antimicrobial resistance, metabolic capability, biofilms and virulence in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The aim of my current project is to use population genetics and transposon directed insertion sequencing (TraDIS) to study new protein antibiotics (bacteriocins) along with their import and susceptibility mechanisms in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae. I am also using machine learning and word embedding based methods to identify new bacteriocins.

Research Interests

Bioinformatics | Genomics | High-throughput mutagenesis | Machine learning | Molecular microbiology | Population biology | Transcriptomics