Salome Desmecht

After my graduation in Veterinary Medicine in 2020 at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Liège, Belgium, I quickly became interested by the field of infectious diseases. The realization of my final project, which concerned the serological diagnosis of African swine fever, has indeed contributed to awaken this particular interest for this theme. After a first research internship at the Integrated Veterinary Research Unit of the University of Namur in Belgium, I obtained a one-year research grant and thus started my scientific career at the GIGA research center of the University of Liège in the fields of virology and immunology by participating in various studies related to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was then hired as an assistant in the Bacteriology laboratory of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the same university. In parallel to this assistantship, I started a PhD that aims to construct, characterize and evaluate the efficacy of recombinant phage endolysins used as enzybiotics against Aeromonas salmonicida, a primary fish pathogen that causes furunculosis in salmonids. In February 2022, I also started my ECVM residency with Prof. Damien Thiry as supervisor in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Liège.