Dr Simon Jackson is a molecular microbiologist and Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato | University of Waikato. He leads the Phage Therapy Research Group, which aims to support the development and clinical adoption of next-generation phage therapies that are equitable, commercially scalable, and sustainable.

Phage therapy—the use of bacteriophages (viruses that selectively infect and kill bacteria)—offers a potential solution to the AMR crisis. Although phage therapies have been used clinically for over a century, widespread uptake is constrained by time-consuming and often costly development pipelines. By integrating cutting edge computational approaches with high-throughput laboratory research, our vision is to establish a genomics-led framework that enables rapid, cost-effective, equitable, and scalable phage therapies in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally.