Mills Bethany

Bethany Mills received the M.Sc. degree in global health and public policy from The University of Edinburgh and the Ph.D. degree in molecular microbiology from the University of Nottingham. Subsequently, she joined the EPSRC IRC Proteus Project and the Translational Healthcare Technologies Group, The University of Edinburgh, where she led infection model development and the validation of optical smart probes and imaging devices for clinical translation in pulmonology. In 2017, she started investigating how such technologies could be adapted for point-of-care diagnosis of infection, considering technological user, and health system requirements in low-resource settings, with a particular focus on microbial keratitis (corneal ulcer). She has built extensive networks across healthcare settings in India with whom she collaborates to co-design and evaluate these technologies, particularly in the field of microbial keratitis. She started her UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2022 to develop pathways to diagnose, treat, and reduce the burden of microbial keratitis in India, with project partner Aravind Eye Care System. The research approach is two-fold, exploring both bottom-up (molecular characterization of the disease pathways and modeling microbial keratitis) and top-down (health-system and patient care pathway mapping) methodologies to drive fundamental insight into the disease. This is enabling development of appropriate diagnostic and treatment tools and strategies within the Indian context.