Role
Dr Jody Winter, Principal Lecturer in Microbiology, partners with public sector organisations and international collaborators to tackle global challenges in antimicrobial resistance and bacterial infections. Her main research interests are the emergence and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and how infection prevention, One Health and antimicrobial stewardship principles can be applied to this problem.
Dr Winter leads the Microbiology subject group within the Department of Biosciences, the Biosciences Outreach group, and the interdisciplinary antimicrobial resistance research cluster at NTU.
She teaches primarily on NTU's BSc (Hons) Microbiology, BSc (Hons) Biological Sciences and BSc (Hons) Biomedical Sciences courses. She leads the One Health module taken by final year Biological Sciences students.
Career overview
Dr Winter completed her PhD in parasite immunology and vaccine design at the University of Nottingham in 2004 and spent the next decade as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, working at the interface of microbiology, molecular biology, and structural biology. Her projects ranged from developing models of protein aggregation in Parkinson’s disease, to studying DNA replication in bacteria and archaea, and investigating how Helicobacter pylori toxins and membrane vesicles influence immune responses and disease.
Alongside her early research, Dr Winter developed extensive teaching experience, through roles as a demonstrator at the University of Nottingham (2001–2006) and Associate Lecturer with The Open University (2009–2019).
In 2014, she joined Nottingham Trent University (NTU) as a Senior Lecturer in Microbiology and was promoted to Principal Lecturer in 2018.
Research areas
Dr Winter’s research focuses on tackling one of the world’s most pressing health challenges: antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Her work combines several approaches to help reduce the emergence and spread of drug-resistant infections. Current projects include laboratory studies to test new antimicrobial compounds and explore how bacteria develop resistance to commonly used antibiotics; surveillance work to track resistant bacteria in hospitals, communities and the environment; and initiatives to improve antimicrobial stewardship and infection prevention across all levels of the healthcare system and in the veterinary and environmental sectors.
As an educator, Dr Winter also investigates how creative teaching methods can enhance student learning in microbiology. Through the Bioscience Scholarship Centre, she evaluates the impact of her teaching innovations including agar art club, pipetting Olympics and a custom-designed board game that illustrates the challenges of bringing a new antimicrobial drug from the lab bench to clinical use.
Dr Winter’s recent research has been funded by Global Health Partnerships (formerly THET), Microbiology Society , NTU, the Africa Research Excellence Fund and BBSRC.
External activity
Through the NTU-MAK partnership, Dr Winter works extensively with researchers from Makerere University and healthcare professionals in Uganda and the UK on AMR and antimicrobial stewardship. With the Environment Agency, her team is exploring the prevalence, sources and potential impacts of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Nottinghamshire’s rivers.
Dr Winter sits on the Impact and Influence Committee of the Microbiology Society, supporting their Knocking Out AMR project, and is a member of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy and European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.