This 4-year PhD project will aim to assess the impact of antimicrobial administration on the evolution of antimicrobial resistance in the gut microbiome of chickens in different farming systems. It will be associated with, and benefit from, a larger programme of work, the UKRI GCRF One Health Poultry Hub (https://www.onehealthpoultry.org/), conducted in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam. Mathematical models simulating the dynamics of gut microbial communities and AMR genes will be developed and fitted to data on antimicrobial usage, residues and composition of chicken gut microbiomes for a range of contexts.

The successful student will be registered at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC), with co-supervision at both RVC (Ludovic Pelligand lpelligand@rvc.ac.uk, Damer Blake dblake@rvc.ac.uk, Guillaume Fournié gfournie@rvc.ac.uk) and the University of Oxford (José Lourenco jose.lourenco@zoo.ox.ac.uk). The studentship is part of the London Interdisciplinary doctoral programme (http://lido-dtp.ac.uk/).

Deadline for application: 09th February 2020