People

Eric Batard, MD, PhD, is Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Nantes, and the Head of the Emergency Department of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. He is the co-director of the MiHAR Lab. He gained his PhD thesis in 2005 on the relationship between the in vitro activity of antibiotics and their efficacy in animal models of infection. He started data mining when he used synchrotron radiation infrared and UV fluorescence microspectroscopy to study the diffusion of antibiotics in tissue bacterial communities. This experience allowed him to cosupervise for his PhD Emmanuel Montassier, who had to handle a great amount of data from gut microbiome. Then, he focused on the influence of antibiotic exposure on bacterial resistance. He is highly involved in the Thresholds Study Group, an international network dedicated to the demonstration that the association between antimicrobial use and resistance is not linear, and to its practical application to guide antibiotic stewardship interventions. He intends to define antibacterial regimens that promote bacterial resistance as little as possible, especially in respiratory and urinary tract infections that he has to treat as an Emergency physician. https://twitter.com/BatardEric

Didier Lepelletier, MD, PhD, is Professor of Bacteriology and Hygiene in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Nantes, and the Head of the Bacteriology and Hygiene Department of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. He is the co-director of the MiHAR Lab. From his PhD that he gained in 2006, he has been working on the influence of antibiotic exposure on bacterial resistance. As an hospital hygienist, he has to implement strategies to contain multidrug resistant (MDR) or highly resistant (HR) Enterobacteriaceae. However, these strategies are highly time and resource-consuming, and Didier intends to identify, among patients that have a MDR/HR organism carriage, those who are at risk of transmission to other patients, relatives or caregivers, and those who are at risk of infection. Taking account of the patients gut microbiome will help for that purpose.

Pascale Bemer, MD, works as a Bacteriologist in the Bacteriology and Hygiene Department of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. Pascale has an extensive experience in bacterial resistance, and she he is in charge of the preparation and quality control of fecal samples for Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes.

Gabriel Birgand, PharmD, PhD, is the Head of Centre for the Prevention of Healthcare-Associated Infections (CPIAS) of Pays-de-la-Loire, a 3.7-million-inhabitant region in western France. In addition to its regional activities, the CPIAS has been commissioned to coordinate the national surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in the ambulatory setting, and is associated to the CPIAS Grand-Est for the coordination of AMR in the hospital setting. Gabriel has published several studies on MDR/HR organism digestive carriage and infection control strategies.  He is currently a postdoc scholar in the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infection and Antimicrobial Resistance at Imperial College London, where he obtained an Antimicrobial research collaborative early career research fellowship.

Céline Bourigault, PharmD, is the Head of the Infection Prevention and Control Unit, a part of the Bacteriology and Hygiene Department, in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. 

Eric Dailly, PharmD, PhD, is Professor of Pharmacology in the University of Nantes, and the Head of the Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology Laboratory of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. He received his pharmacy and pharmacology (PhD) training at Paris V and Paris XII Universities. He works on factors affecting in vivo drugs pharmacokinetics, including host factors (e.g. burn injury, obesity and drug interactions) and the intestinal microbiota.

Laure de Decker, MD, PhD, is Professor of Geriatrics in the University of Nantes, and the Head of the Geriatric Acute Care Unit of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. She gained her PhD in 2012 on the assessment of comorbidities in elderly patients. Due to frequent bacterial resistance, comorbidities and antibacterial therapies, elderly patients constitute a select population to study the interactions between host characterisics, antibiotics, digestive microbiota and bacterial resistance.

Michel Dion, PhD, is Professor of Microbiology in the University of Nantes. He teaches molecular biology and microbiology at the Faculty of Sciences and Technics. He has extensively worked on glycosidases and oligosaccharides. He has joined the MiHAR Lab to study the treament of intestinal carriage of MDR bacteria with probiotics and/or prebiotics.

Emmanuel Montassier, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Therapeutics in the University of Nantes, and works in the Emergency Department of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. He is the Head of Clinical Research Unit of the Emergency Department.  He gained his PhD in 2014 on the alterations of gut microbiota by myeloablative chemotherapy in non Hodgkin lymphoma patients. Emmanuel specialized in bioinformatics and biostatistical analyses of microbiomes during a 1-year postdoctoral scholarship in Dan Knights Lab at the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Thanks to his skills in metagenomics analysis, he has been collaborating with various Research Units in Nantes. 

Gilles Potel, MD, PhD, is Professor of Therapeutics in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Nantes, and the Director of the Federation of Anesthesiology, Intensive Care, Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nantes. He was the former director of the Thérapeutiques cliniques et expérimentales des infections Lab, from which most of the MiHAR Lab members originated.  He has an extensive experience in animal models of infection, bacterial resistance and clinical use of antibacterial agents.

Marie-Anne Vibet, PhD, gained her PhD in Biostatitics in 2014, and specialized in time series analysis, that she uses to study the relationship between antimicrobial use and resistance at the population level. She is highly involved in the Thresholds Study Group, an international network dedicated to the demonstration that the association between antimicrobial use and resistance is not linear, and to its practical application to guide antibiotic stewardship interventions.