Her team researches how bacterial pathogens are able to form long-lived, chronic infections with high levels of tolerance to antibiotics. To do this, they study how bacteria grow and behave, and respond to drugs, in environments that closely mimic the unique environments they find inside an infected person. They are especially interested in infections in the lungs of people with the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, infections of non-healing wounds, and infections that stem from microbial contamination of hospital ventilator tubes. They are using our microbiology knowledge, and a set of new tools that we have built in the lab, to try to find the Achilles' heel of debilitating and often lethal biofilm infections. They hope their tools will help researchers work on many different aspects of lung infection microbiology without the need for experiments on live animals. They also work with colleagues from different disciplines to discover new molecules that could treat antibiotic-resistant infections. With colleagues from the arts and humanities, they are researching infection remedies from medieval and early modern medical books to see if any of them contain molecules with real potential to treat infection. With colleagues from chemistry, they are testing synthetic molecules for their ability to kill bacteria.