Patricia Simner

Dr. Simner is an Associate Professor of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Director of the Medical Bacteriology and Parasitology Laboratories at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Manitoba in Manitoba, Canada and a two year Clinical Microbiology Fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Her research has focused on understanding the epidemiology and molecular mechanisms of resistance of Gram-negative bacteria, in particular those harboring β-lactamase enzymes. With the increasing prevalence of carbapenemase-producing organism (CPO), her focus has evolved to studying novel diagnostic methods for the detection of these clinically important pathogens and understanding their mechanisms of resistance and spread in the hospital setting. She is well published with greater than 65 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 10 book chapters.

Dr. Simner is currently the principal investigator for a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant which seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and spread amongst all CPO in a region of the US endemic for CPO. In addition, she is involved in many interdisciplinary collaborative research projects. She is also interested in novel diagnostic tools for infectious diseases and is actively involved in validating metagenomic next-generation sequencing as a diagnostic tool.

Dr. Simner is an advisor for the Subcommittee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing for the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute, a member of the Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Taskforce for the CDC and she was recently elected as the Early Career At-Large representative for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Council on Microbial Sciences. She is also an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.

Finally, Dr. Simner was selected as the recipient of the 2018 ASM Diagnostic Young Investigators’ Award and was recognized as the 2018 Department of Microbiology Distinguished Alumna from the University of Manitoba, Canada.