Margo Diricks is a bioengineer who completed her PhD in biocatalysis at the University of Ghent in Belgium. After working for three years at a bioinformatics company, she joined the Research Centre Borstel (RCB) – Leibniz Lung Centre in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. At RCB, Margo has focused 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, Haemophilus influenzae, and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, in order to study their transmission dynamics, population structure, and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Margo is 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), the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST), the European Society for Mycobacteriology (ESM), NTM-net, Infectnet, the German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF), the 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 the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) Study Group for Epidemiological Markers (ESGEM)-AMR working groups, which focus on curating organism-specific rule sets for interpreting AMR genotypes and on developing diagnostic guidelines for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI). She is also an editor for BMC Genomic Data and a guest editor for Genome Biology.