Presenters' biography

Speaker 1 - Dr. ir. Margo Diricks (Postdoc/Molecular epidemiologist, Research Center Borstel - Leibniz Lung Center, Germany)
		Margo is a bioengineer who completed her PhD in the field of biocatalysis at the University of Ghent, Belgium. After working for three years at a bioinformatics company, she joined the Research Center Borstel (RCB) – Leibniz Lung Center in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. At RCB, Margo has focussed on developing and applying bioinformatic tools and pipelines to analyze, interpret, and visualize genomic data of emerging drug-resistant lung pathogens, such as non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM), Haemophilus influenzae, and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, in order to study their transmission dynamics, population structure, and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The past years, she has analyzed over 4,000 genomic datasets of virtually all NTM species currently known. She is the curator of the publicly available 7-loci MLST and core genome MLST (cgMLST) typing schemes for Mycobacterium abscessus on pubMLST, which provide global reference frameworks for molecular surveillance and transmission analysis. She is also actively engaged in large-scale national and international collaborations and professional networks, including the Pan-Africa Network for Genomic Surveillance of Poverty-Related Diseases and Emerging Pathogens (PANgenS), Clinical and laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI), European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST), the European Society for Mycobacteriology (ESM), NTM-net, Infectnet, German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Cluster of Excellence - "Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation (PMI), the One Health Platform (OHP), and the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology (DGHM). In addition, she contributes to ESCMID ESGEM-AMR working groups, which focus on curating organism-specific rule sets for interpreting AMR genotypes. She is also editor for BMC Genomic Data and guest editor for Genome Biology.

Speaker 1 - Dr. ir. Margo Diricks (Postdoc/Molecular epidemiologist, Research Center Borstel - Leibniz Lung Center, Germany)

Margo is a bioengineer who completed her PhD in the field of biocatalysis at the University of Ghent, Belgium. After working for three years at a bioinformatics company, she joined the Research Center Borstel (RCB) – Leibniz Lung Center in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. At RCB, Margo has focussed on developing and applying bioinformatic tools and pipelines to analyze, interpret, and visualize genomic data of emerging drug-resistant lung pathogens, such as non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM), Haemophilus influenzae, and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, in order to study their transmission dynamics, population structure, and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The past years, she has analyzed over 4,000 genomic datasets of virtually all NTM species currently known.

She is the curator of the publicly available 7-loci MLST and core genome MLST (cgMLST) typing schemes for Mycobacterium abscessus on pubMLST, which provide global reference frameworks for molecular surveillance and transmission analysis.

She is also actively engaged in large-scale national and international collaborations and professional networks, including the Pan-Africa Network for Genomic Surveillance of Poverty-Related Diseases and Emerging Pathogens (PANgenS), Clinical and laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI), European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST), the European Society for Mycobacteriology (ESM), NTM-net, Infectnet, German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Cluster of Excellence - "Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation (PMI), the One Health Platform (OHP), and the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology (DGHM). In addition, she contributes to ESCMID ESGEM-AMR working groups, which focus on curating organism-specific rule sets for interpreting AMR genotypes. She is also editor for BMC Genomic Data and guest editor for Genome Biology.

Last modified: Wednesday, 22 April 2026, 4:22 PM