Professor in Microbiology at the Dental Faculty, University of Oslo, Fernanda Petersen leads a multidisciplinary research team working with antimicrobial resistance.
Through more than two decades of research, her studies have gradually expanded from bacterial group behavior, to the potential of commensal species to protect against pathogens, and more recently to the impact of antibiotics on microbial communities. The last build on new advancements in sequencing technologies and computational methods to achieve the large-scale requirements for resistome analysis of complex communities.
The experimental approaches range from single bacterial models to animal and clinical investigations, and development of tools to help clinicians and researchers unfamiliar with programming languages to explore resistome data.
How does antibiotic therapy duration affect the microbiome? What is the impact of antibiotics on the oral/respiratory resistomes? How does antibiotic use at an early age influence immune development? These are some of the questions she is addressing in her studies.