Cherry Lim

Cherry Lim is based at the University of Oxford and the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Thailand. Cherry currently holds a Wellcome Early Career Award. The goal of Cherry's Wellcome-funded project is to develop a framework to inform Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) and Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) guidelines for settings with a high burden of antibiotic resistance. Cherry will be generating multi-species bacterial genomic data and linking them to clinical, microbial phenotype, treatment, and outcome data on hospital-acquired infections. She will also combine probabilistic bacterial transmission and causal models, and use passive surveillance data to quantify the expected impacts of implementing different guidelines.

Previously, Cherry worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Ben Cooper’s DRIaDD group based in Oxford. Her work used causal inference to help quantify the burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections. This involved applying a counterfactual framework to analyse the relationship between antibiotic-resistant infections and patient mortality using longitudinal data.

Other projects that Cherry was involved in included assessing the cost-effectiveness of an enhanced surveillance system in Timor-Leste, evaluating the impact of empirical antibiotic use on patient survival to inform antibiotic use policy (the Wellcome-funded ADILA project), and a collaborative project with Direk Limmathurotsakul on developing tools for an antimicrobial resistance surveillance system.

She completed a DPhil in 2022 on projects focusing on hospital-acquired drug-resistant bacterial infections and antimicrobial resistance surveillance systems in Southeast Asia. Here is her career story on the Wellcome’s Research Careers examples page.