Tori Peters

I am from Auckland, and have been here all my life. I love playing Dungeons and Dragons, playing games on my laptop or phone, doing the New York Times daily puzzles, and having a gym-TV-hangout session with my friends.

Probably Egypt – I love reading about older civilisations and visited Greece and Italy years ago for Classics.

Probably Dungeons and Dragons, if I’m being honest.

Tackling antimicrobial resistance in sinusitis.

I loved biology at school, so I also did it in undergrad. Over the course of the degree I found I liked microbes best as a topic. However, I was more interested in the biomedical side of things, so diverged into it for my postgrad.

In the Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) lab where I am, there’s a fun intersection between microbiology and pharmacology that I love and want to pursue as a career.

It’s a lofty goal, but I do hope to make some kind of antibiotic resistance. Bacteria are very sneaky at escaping our treatments, and they keep getting sneakier. That means a lot of people suffer and die and we can’t do much about it.

My research targets an aspect of antibiotic resistance seen in people suffering from chronic rhinosinusitis. Hopefully, I will be able to make their lives a little easier and stop their infections recurring.

I plan to go into industry, ideally doing microbiology at a pharmaceutical company, if World War III hasn’t started by then.

Tamsyn Muir, a New Zealand author who writes the phenomenal Locked Tomb series.

Brennan Lee Mulligan, a Dungeons and Dragons guy who is a relentlessly benevolent person.

Isaac Asimov, the biochemist and science fiction author who just had some really cool concepts.

Barry Marshall, the guy who couldn’t figure out how to infect piglets with an infectious bacterium so he just decided to drink it to see if that would work. It did. He had a bad week.