Siddhartha Thakur

Bio

Sid Thakur has specialized in antimicrobial resistant infectious pathogens and food safety for nearly 20 years.

Throughout his career, he has applied a One Health approach to investigate the impact of interplay between animals, humans and their environment on the dissemination and persistence of antimicrobial resistant bacterial strains.

His lab focuses on understanding the molecular epidemiology of multi-drug resistant foodborne pathogens to improve global food safety, and the dynamics of bacterial pathogens in food animals, retail meat, humans and the environment. Thakur’s lab also represents the State of North Carolina in two national surveillance systems: the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) and the whole genome sequencing Genome Trakr program.

Thakur has active collaborations in several countries. Among these global projects, he led a WHO-AGISAR project in India to establish an antimicrobial resistance surveillance system across human and veterinary institutions, and collaborated with researchers from the University of Surrey, UK, to create a Collaborative Hub for Advancing Interdisciplinary Research (CHAIR), which aimed to reduce and prevent the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in animal and human populations.

In 2018, Thakur was named director of the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Global Health program, and also Director of Global Health for NC State University. In these roles, Thakur plans to build multidisciplinary collaborations within the college and with global partners to reduce the burden of infectious diseases in humans and animals.