Speaker: Dr Nicky Thomas, NH&MRC Early Career Research Fellow and Research Associate at the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, University of South Australia
Title: Re-thinking, Re-purposing, Re-formulating – The Design and Evaluation of Novel Strategies Against Biofilm Infections
Chair: Associate Professor Sarah Vreugde, Senior Scientist, ENT Surgery, Discipline of Surgery, University of Adelaide Level1 BHI, TQEH. [email protected]
Speaker biography: Nicky Thomas is an NH&MRC Early Career Research Fellow and Research Associate at the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, University of South Australia. Nicky is a trained pharmacist with several years of experience in both hospital and community pharmacies. In 2012 he was awarded his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences with distinction from the University of Otago, New Zealand. Nicky’s PhD research was concerned with the development and in vitro and in vivo characterisation of nanoemulsions for drug delivery.
He joined UniSA in 2012 to work on novel treatments against bacterial biofilms. Building on his expertise in nanomedicine-based drug delivery systems Nicky has been awarded an NH&MRC Early Career Researcher Fellowship in 2014 for the investigation on the interaction of antimicrobial therapies with bacterial biofilms. In 2017 Nicky established the Adelaide Biofilm Test Facility at UniSA’s Sansom Institute for Health Research, SA’s first facility dedicated to test antimicrobials and pharmaceutical products in a range of in vitro and in vivo biofilm models. He is actively engaged in the research and broader community, as a lecturer and is currently the (co)-supervisor of 8 PhD students. Nicky’s national and international collaborations include The University of Adelaide, Monash University, Lundbeck Pharmaceuticals A/S (Denmark); University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Ghent University (Belgium), Johnson and Johnson Pharma (Belgium), SickKids Hospital (Toronto, Canada), Virginia Tech (USA) and the University of Nottingham (Malaysia Campus).
