Professional profile

Career level:
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Status as medical specialist:
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Medical specialty, field of interest:
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Research profile:
Research has always been an important and rewarding aspect of my journey as a clinical microbiologist. The key areas of my active research are described as below:

A) Mycology
One of my research interests includes the study of local epidemiology of Candida blood stream infections (BSI). In a recent collaboration with the Department of Infectious Diseases, TTSH and the Department of Pharmacy, Singapore General Hospital, I have correlated clinical outcome with patient demographics, clinical risk factors and empirical antifungal treatment. Species specific susceptibility data has been generated while analyzing hotspot mutations like Fks1, Fks2 for the echinocandins.
I have performed a longitudinal surveillance of susceptibility among Candida spp. from BSI to echinocandins over a period of four consecutive years.
Also, I have investigated the emerging resistance to azoles among C. tropicalis across 2 neighboring tertiary care centres. I have simultaneously drawn attention to the futile practice of performing routine susceptibilities for C.albicans from BSI.
These projects have helped bridge the knowledge gap on the epidemiology of Candida BSI including resistance profiles prevalent locally. A significant portion of the work has been presented at CACMID-AMMI and Hospital Infection Society conferences.


a) Antimicrobial Resistance

I recently secured an industry sponsored research grant from Bayer Pharmaceuticals to investigate the susceptibility profiles of six gram positive pathogen groups to tedizolid, a novel oxazolidinone. The project compared the two microdilution methods namely, Etest and Sensititre broth in terms of Essential and Categorical Agreements. In this project I recruited a team of four technical staff to carry out hands on experiments on the in-vitro activity of the 2 oxazolidinones, linezolid and tedizolid, deriving the MIC50 and MIC90 for each pathogen group. This culminated in a publication in a peer reviewed journal as well as a Scientific Poster at an Overseas conference.

In a separate collaboration with Merck Sharp and Dohme, we have investigated the susceptibility among local strains of multi drug resistant gram negative pathogens to the novel antimicrobial, Ceftolozane-Tazobactam.

In another project, I have profiled carbapenemase producers by species, genotype (bla NDM-1, bla KPC and bla OXA-48) and site of infection to evaluate potential therapeutic options. In the course of this research, I have determined old antibiotics including fosfomycin and tigecycline to be active for site-specific infections due to Carbapenemase producers.

Current (last) position held

Current employer company:
Virtus Diagnostics
Melbourne, Australia

Job title:
Consultant Microbiologist

Duration:
18 December 2024

Work experience

Please refer to Resume above.