Associate Professor Sally PartridgePrincipal Research Fellow; Medicine, Westmead Clinical School - Critical Infection / BARRD Group

 Phone02 86273412

 Fax02 86273099

 Emailsally.partridge(at)sydney.edu.au

Sally Partridge is a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, The Westmead Institute for Medical Research. Following a PhD on sporulation in Bacillus subtilis and a postdoctoral position on cell division in this bacterium, Sally has been working on the genetics of mobile antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacteria since 1997, moving to Westmead Hospital and the Westmead Institute in 2005.

In addition to her primary research papers, Sally has published two major reviews, one on antibiotic resistance genes carried by the integron/gene cassette system, and the other on analysis of DNA sequences relating to antibiotic resistance. She has provided the biological expertise to create the Repository of Antibiotic resistance Cassettes (RAC) and Multi-Antibiotic Resistance Annotator (MARA) websites that provide databases and an annotation service for antibiotic resistance genes and mobile elements.

Sally has been on the Editorial Board of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy since 2009, is a Founding Fellow of the Faculty of Science of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia (2011), was appointed to the Westmead Institute Faculty in 2012, and has served on NHMRC Project grant review panels (2012-14). She is also involved in current efforts by the NCBI to address issues with resistance gene nomenclature and also currently co-supervises two PhD students with Prof Jon Iredell.

Keywords

Antibiotic resistance, Bacteriology, Microbiology, Genetics, Bioinformatics

Themes

Infection and Immunological Conditions

Sally’s current research involves detailed comparative analysis of antibiotic resistance plasmids to try and understand more about how antibiotic resistance spreads, including developing bioinformatic tools to facilitate analysis of complex multi-resistance regions in bacterial DNA sequences. She is also involved in projects using epidemiological surveys to develop rapid tools for screening for antibiotic resistance genes, analysing the effects of different antibiotics on mouse and human microbiomes, and developing ‘probiotic’ plasmids to try and eradicate the problematic plasmids responsible for much of the spread of antibiotic resistance in enteric bacteria.

Faculty of Medicine and Health > FMH Medical Research Institutes > Westmead Institute for Medical Research

• 2015 – RCPA Visiting Lecturer 

 

• BA (Biochemistry), University of Oxford, UK
• PhD, Developmental Microbiology, University of Oxford, UK