Rietie Venter, PhD

I obtained my BSc Hons and Master’s degrees with distinction from the University of the Free State in South Africa. As top student in my BSc Hons class I secured an international scholarship to fund my PhD studies at the University of Leeds. After completing my PhD on membrane protein biochemistry at the University of Leeds in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, I moved to Cambridge, where I spend twelve years doing research on multidrug transporters, first as a post-doc and later running my own research group as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge. During this time, I was also appointed as College Lecturer in Robinson College, University of Cambridge, where I did small-group tutoring and teaching. Not content with moving continents once in a lifetime, I left the ancient buildings and immaculate college lawns of Cambridge for sun and sea in Australia after sixteen years in the UK. I joined the University of South Australia as Senior Lecturer and Head of Microbiology in the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences in December 2012.
 
Current research & highlights
My research focuses on antimicrobial resistance. ‘Superbugs’ are costing the medical and veterinary industry billions of dollars a year and antimicrobial resistance is one of the world’s most pressing health problems. According to the WHO we are fast approaching a post-antibiotic era where small injuries and minor infections will once again be fatal. Work in my laboratory is aimed at finding novel ways of treating infectious disease by characterising bacterial membrane proteins that are involved in drug resistance and/or virulence and on developing drugs that act on these targets. We are currently working on drug efflux pumps, iron transporters and cell division proteins in pathogenic bacteria. Most of our work focusses on the Gram-negative pathogen P. aeruginosa. This pathogen is associated with a range of life-threatening nosocomial infections and is the main cause of mortality in patients with cystic fibrosis. P. aeruginosa infections are hard to treat since this organism displays resistance against multiple classes of antimicrobials. Central to this bacterium’s high intrinsic drug resistance is the expression of drug efflux pumps and its ability to form antibiotic-tolerant biofilms.