My research interests are in the area of infectious diseases, the microbiome, and its impact on health and wellbeing.  I am particularly interested in harnessing ‘omics technologies to understand how microbes evolve, spread, survive and compete in the food chain to reduce foodborne illness and to counter antimicrobial resistance.

I am Director and Chief Executive Officer of Quadram Institute Bioscience and prior to becoming the founding Director of the Quadram Institute I was Director of the ithree institute, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

I have over 30 years’ experience in academic and commercial research.  My academic career has included being a founding member of The Wolfson Institute for BioMedical Research at University College London, one the UK’s first institutes of translational medicine. I have also worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Glaxo Wellcome, and founded biotech companies in the area of infectious disease, including Arrow Therapeutics, sold to AstraZeneca in 2007, and Auspherix, a venture capital backed company founded in 2013.

Key Publications

Gloag ES, Elbadawi C, Zachreson CJ, Aharonovich I, Toth M, Charles IG, Turnbull L, Whitchurch CB. Front Microbiol. 2017 Jan 23;7:2157. Micro-Patterned Surfaces That Exploit Stigmergy to Inhibit Biofilm Expansion.

Labbate M, Orata FD, Petty NK, Jayatilleke ND, King WL, Kirchberger PC, Allen C, Mann G, Mutreja A, Thomson NR, Boucher Y, Charles IG. Sci Rep. 2016 Nov 15;6:36891. A genomic island in Vibrio cholerae with VPI-1 site-specific recombination characteristics contains CRISPR-Cas and type VI secretion modules.

Wyrsch ER, Roy Chowdhury P, Chapman TA, Charles IG, Hammond JM, Djordjevic SP. Front Microbiol. 2016 Jun 15;7:843.  Genomic Microbial Epidemiology Is Needed to Comprehend the Global Problem of Antibiotic Resistance and to Improve Pathogen Diagnosis.

Turnbull L, Toyofuku M, Hynen AL, Kurosawa M, Pessi G, Petty NK, Osvath SR, Cárcamo-Oyarce G, Gloag ES, Shimoni R, Omasits U, Ito S, Yap X, Monahan LG, Cavaliere R, Ahrens CH, Charles IG, Nomura N, Eberl L, Whitchurch CB. Explosive cell lysis as a mechanism for the biogenesis of bacterial membrane vesicles and biofilms. Nat Commun. 2016 Apr 14;7:11220.

Joss TV, Burke CM, Hudson BJ, Darling AE, Forer M, Alber DG, Charles IG, Stow NW. Bacterial Communities Vary between Sinuses in Chronic Rhinosinusitis Patients. Front Microbiol. 2016 Jan 22;6:1532.

Chaudhuri RR, Morgan E, Peters SE, Pleasance, SJ, Hudson DL, Davies HM, Wang J, van Diemen PM, Buckley AM, Bowen AJ, Turner DJ, Langridge GC, Turner AK, Parkhill J, Charles IG, Duncan J. Maskell, & Stephens MP.  (2013) Genes required for colonisation of food animals by Salmonella Plos Pathogens – Apr; 9(4):e1003456.

Gloag ES, Turnbull L, Huang A, Vallotton P, Wang H, Nolan LM, Mililli L, Hunt C, Lu J, Osvath SR, Monahan LG, Cavaliere R, Charles IG, Wand MP, Gee ML, Prabhakar R, Whitchurch CB. Self-organization of bacterial biofilms is facilitated by extracellular DNA. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Jul 9;110(28):11541-6.

Monahan LG, Turnbull L, Osvath SR, Birch D, Charles IG, Whitchurch CB. Rapid conversion of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to a spherical cell morphotype facilitates tolerance to carbapenems and penicillins but increases susceptibility to antimicrobial peptides. Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 2014;58(4):1956-62. Epub 2014

Monahan LG, Hajduk IV, Blaber SP, Charles IG, Harry EJ.Coordinating bacterial cell division with nutrient availability: a role for glycolysis. MBio. 2014 May 13;5(3):e00935-14.

Wyrsch E, Roy Chowdhury P, Abraham S, Santos J, Darling AE, Charles IG, Chapman TA, Djordjevic SP. Comparative genomic analysis of a multiple antimicrobial resistant enterotoxigenic E. coli O157 lineage from Australian pigs. BMC Genomics. 2015 Mar 10;16:165.