Charlotte Roughton
She/Her
I am bi and I am a microbiologist.//
Hi! I’m a microbiology PhD student at Newcastle University. I’m interested in how microbes cause disease and currently working on the superbug Clostridioides difficile. C. difficile infects the colon, causing persistent diarrhoea and, in severe cases, holes in the gut. It’s tricky to treat, resistant to many of the drugs available against microbes, so we urgently need to find new ways of treating this infection. My research aims to help further unravel how this bug forms spores, which are the key vehicles it uses to cause unpleasant recurrent infections and spread to others. By understanding more about this process, hopefully in the future new drugs can be developed that can target C. difficile and prevent it from forming spores, therefore stopping infections from recurring and spreading.
I only recently came out, but I’m so proud to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community, and hope to contribute towards making science a more inclusive place. After all, science is conducted by people, so it’s vital that the wide diversity of people that exist are adequately represented.