Dr Joshua Quick

Dr Joshua Quick

School of Biosciences
UKRI Future Leaders Fellow

Contact details

Address
University of Birmingham
G20, School of Biosciences
Institute of Microbiology and Infection
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Josh is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Birmingham developing novel methods for rapid antimicrobial resistance (AMR) prediction. He is a molecular biologist specialising in next-generation sequencing and has worked on both bacterial genomics and viral surveillance of outbreaks. He travelled to Guinea in West Africa and established the first mobile laboratory to perform viral surveillance during the West African Ebola virus epidemic. He also developed an amplicon-based sequencing method which has been widely used for Zika, Yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, Ebola virus and SARS-CoV-2. He is currently focusing on bacterial single-cell technology as an approach to tackle the growing threat of resistance by rapidly identifying resistance genes in clinical samples.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Biological Sciences, University of Birmingham, 2018
  • BSc (Hons) in Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, 2007

Biography

Josh started his career in industry working on the development of Illumina DNA sequencing platforms including the HiSeq 2000 and MiSeq. After meeting Nick Loman though the MiSeq early access program he moved to Birmingham to start a PhD in Biological Sciences in 2012. During his PhD Josh applied whole-genome sequencing to investigate hospital outbreaks of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Salmonella enterica. He later travelled to Guinea in West Africa to establish the first real-time, genomic surveillance laboratory which has since become the gold-standard in outbreak management. He has also travelled to Brazil, DRC and São Tomé with a lab-in-a-suitcase for research purposes or WHO deployments. He develops the primalscheme primer design software and the ARTIC protocol for amplicon sequencing using nanopore, the most popular method for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing with over 1M genomes produced. In 2019 he was awarded a 7-year UKRI FLF fellowship to establish his own lab. The project OneAMR aims to develop rapid, portable genomics for the prediction of antibiotic resistance, a serious threat which has rendered many existing antibiotics ineffective. He chairs the sequencing working group for the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, the world leaders in genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2.