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Dr Lena Ciric
Senior Lecturer
Dept of Civil, Environ &Geomatic Eng
Faculty of Engineering Science
- Joined UCL
- 2nd Jul 2007
Research summary
Lena's research expertise lies in the application of molecular biology techniques to the profiling of microbial communities in various environments, from diesel degrading consortia, the healthy and diseased human microbiome, to the communities present in the air and on high touch surfaces in public spaces. She also studies bacterial antibiotic resistance mechanisms and their modes of transfer among different communities. Furthermore, she is interested in the discovery of novel antimicrobial strategies. Lena leads the Healthy Infrastructure Research Group at UCL CEGE (www.cege.ucl.ac.uk/HIRG). The group carries out research investigating engineering solutions that reduce the spread of infectious disease and improve environmental health. She is also the coordinator of the UCL AMR Network which is bringing together researchers from many disciplines to work on AMR.
Teaching summary
Dr. Ciric is the director of the Environmental Systems Engineering MSc at CEGE and the coordinator of the Environmental Systems module. She also delivers lectures on the UCL Engineering (Civil) Programme in Years 1 and 3. She also contributes lectures to the CEGE Water and Wastewater Treatment and Engineering Impact Assessment modules. She has successfully
supervised over 20 MSc and over ten UG research projects. She currently has four PhD students.
Education
- Napier University , Edinburgh
- PhD, Molecular Microbial Ecology | 2007
- University of Oxford
- BA, Biology | 2000
Biography
Lena completed her first degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford in 2000. She then went on to work as a research assistant at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Oxford. She completed a CASE PhD Studentship at CEH and Napier University Edinburgh investigating the bacterial community dynamics in diesel degrading consortia in 2006. Lena moved to the UCL Eastman Dental Institute in 2007 and worked on two EU funded postdoctoral projects. The first investigating the antimicrobial activity of functional foods, the latter looking for novel antibiotic resistance genes and mobile genetic elements encoding resistance genes. Lena took up a permanent post at UCL CEGE in October 2012.