Nenad Macesic wins Mollie Holman Award for PhD thesis

Dr Nenad Macesic wins Mollie Holman
medal for 2020 thesis.

Congratulations to Dr Nenad Macesic on winning the Mollie Holman award for 2020. The Mollie Holman Medal was established in 1998 and is named after the late pioneering physiologist Emeritus Professor Mollie Homan AO, in honour of her significant contributions to science and education. These medals are among the highest academic honours given by Monash University, and mark the recipients as researchers of the higher order.award.

Nenad's thesis is titled, "Combating Gram negative multi-drug resistance with insights from novel bioinformatics approaches". He was supervised by Professor Anton Peleg (Department of Infectious Diseases) and Dr Anne-Catrin Uhlemann (Columbia University). The PhD was awarded 11 June 2020.

Nenad says about his thesis, "Antibiotic resistant (‘superbug’) infections are a major global health problem. Genetic sequencing is giving us important insights into these infections. In this PhD, I used genetic sequencing to understand how patients are colonized and develop infections with superbugs. I then used it to study two new kinds of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Then, I focused on resistance to polymyxins, last-line superbug treatments. I used genetic sequencing to determine what kinds of polymyxin resistance there are and how they spread in hospital, as well as discovering a new kind. Finally, I used artificial intelligence to predict polymyxin resistance from bacterial genetic sequences." 

Nenad is an Infectious Diseases Physician and Researcher at the Alfred Hospital and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He cares for patients with infectious complications following solid organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplant. His research interest is in applying novel bioinformatics approaches to improving diagnosis and treatment of antimicrobial resistance. He says, "My research aims to translate the promise of novel developments in whole-genome sequencing, machine learning and healthcare analytics into better outcomes for patients."