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Profiles of Doctorate Dissertations
Research Relevance and Potential Impact
Multi-drug resistant bacteria represent one of the most serious challenges currently we face in
medicine. An important feature of several multi-drug resistant pathogens is their clonal nature,
i.e. some lineages are more prone to spread and cause clusters of infections, i.e. outbreaks, than
others. Obviously, if we understood how these strains spread, we could interfere with it limiting
the burden they cause. However, we do not even know why these “global” or “international”
clones are fit to spread that other strains. Work in this thesis examined the possible reasons
of this epidemiological fitness by comparing various features of clonal and non-clonal isolates
of Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. It was concluded that the resistance to drugs
are more characteristic to clones that any other fitness features, like virulence. Importantly,
as the pools of strains studied had been compiled from collections of countries of the Arabian
Peninsula, simultaneously, the study resulted in several new observations regarding the
features of local isolates, such as locally dominating clones, their susceptibility to antibiotics
and disinfectants etc. It is believed that the results will contribute to a better understanding of
the local and global epidemiology of multi-drug resistant isolates.
Relevant Publications
N/P
Career Aspirations
My career aspiration is to do more education-related projects within my profession as clinical
laboratory scientist in Dubai Hospital. I would like to combine my technical expertise with
principles of education and research to develop materials that clinical laboratory scientists can
use to maintain their skills. The need to continually update our skills does not stop with college
graduation. Just like many other health care fields, we are required to maintain our skills
through continuing education, which I like to continue that after graduation from PhD program.