Professor Gerry Wright Lecture
Prof Gerry Wright
McMaster University, Candada
"There is still gold to be found: Revisiting microbes as sources of new antibiotics"
Warwick Chemical Biology Lecture
IBRB.01, Gibbet Hill
13:00 Thursday 10 May, 2026
Prof Gerry Wright, a Distinguished Professor and Michael G. DeGroote Chair in Infection and Anti-Infective Research in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, and David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery at McMaster University, Canada will be visiting the department on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 September. Gerry will delivering this lecture as part of his visit. All staff and students are welcome to attend.
Once relegated to the past, when it was thought that all the useful antibiotic classes had been discovered, the mining of microbes for natural product antibiotics is increasingly offering new chemical scaffolds for drug development. Using new strategies that focus on advances in genomics, analytical chemistry, and systems biology, novel natural product chemistry is being uncovered. Examples of our efforts to revisit microbes using genome mining, resistance, and pre-fractionation of extracts will be highlighted as strategies for finding new bioactive compounds.
Gerry is a world-leading authority on antibiotic resistance and the discovery of new antibiotics (>65,000 total citations, h-index 111).
Read more about Prof Gerry WrightlLink opens in a new window