Program - Workshops
Workshop selection will open to registered delegates at 5:30pm (Brisbane time) on 29 June 2026, with places allocated on a first come, first served basis. Attendance is included with conference registration, with no additional cost to participate.
Tuesday 4th August
S2.3A | Tuesday 4th August | 2:00pm-3:30pm
This interactive workshop addresses the critical but underrepresented role of chemistry in both driving and tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Bringing together chemists and microbiologists, it will explore antimicrobial lifecycles, transformation products, mixtures, detection methods, and chemical risk assessment. Through collaborative discussions and interactive tools, participants will develop a shared framework for integrating chemistry into AMR research and policy. Attendees will gain practical insights, foster interdisciplinary partnerships, and contribute to outputs including a joint opinion article, supporting more effective, globally relevant AMR strategies.
S2.4A | Tuesday 4th August | 4:00pm-6:00pm
For One Health surveillance to work, environmental AMR data must be available, accessible, and — critically — accepted as evidence alongside clinical and veterinary data. That acceptance depends on shared standards, and on connecting to the resources the other sectors already rely on. A platform for environmental AMR cannot stand alone: it needs links to established sequence repositories such as NCBI, and to reference frameworks like EUCAST, whose curation and breakpoints have been shaped largely by clinical and veterinary inputs. Building those connections is what allows environmental findings to be read in the same terms as the rest of the One Health picture. With the revised EU Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive now mandating AMR monitoring, the window is open. Participants will co-create a roadmap, interoperability criteria, and an initial platform outline.
S2.3B | Tuesday 4th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
From Evidence to Action is an interactive workshop that uses a role-play simulation to immerse participants into the complex world of AMR policymaking. Through small-group deliberation, attendees will step into stakeholder roles to explore how scientific evidence, values, and political priorities intersect in AMR decision making. Participants will leave with tools for communicating research across sectors and strategies for integrating evidence into policy processes that are co-created during the workshop. All are welcome regardless of expertise or career level, and no experience in role-play is required.
S2.3C | Tuesday 4th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
Wastewater systems are increasingly recognised as critical control points linking public health, environmental protection, and safe water reuse. This workshop will examine how antimicrobial resistance can be measurably reduced across biological, physical, and chemical treatment barriers, moving beyond passive monitoring toward intervention-oriented control. Bringing together perspectives from environmental microbiology, chemical analysis, process engineering, and risk assessment, participants will explore the fate of resistant bacteria, resistance genes, and mobile genetic elements across wastewater treatment. Through expert input and interactive synthesis, the workshop will define priority metrics, knowledge gaps, and engineering leverage points for verifiable AMR mitigation.
S2.3D | Tuesday 4th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
How does the environment influence the spread of AMR through our food systems? Join this interactive workshop to explore AMR at the food–environment interface using Systems Thinking and a One Health lens. Drawing on real-world examples, participants will map the complex connections between environmental reservoirs, food production, animals and human exposure, while identifying leverage points for effective intervention. Designed for researchers, environmental scientists, practitioners and decision-makers, the workshop provides practical, accessible tools to better understand complex AMR challenges, uncover opportunities for action, and support collaborative, evidence-informed solutions across sectors.
S2.3E | Tuesday 4th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
An effective environmental risk assessment is a critical lever to limit the evolution, emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance in the environment. This workshop brings together researchers, policy makers and industry representatives, and aims to identify the key scientific knowledge gaps and challenges relating to environmental risk assessment across the entire life cycle of antimicrobials, amidst complex and shifting regulatory and legislative landscapes. This is an opportunity for researchers to gain insights into research translation, and for stakeholders to immerse themselves in the latest scientific thinking. Discussions will inform a collaborative, peer-reviewed publication in this timely research, policy, and regulatory space.
S2.3F | Tuesday 4th August | 2:00pm-3:30pm
Environmental AMR surveillance and research rely on analyzing samples of metagenomic DNA. This includes the quantification of AMR markers and the identification of their genetic context to demonstrate mobility or multiple resistance. Among the employed technologies are PCR-based approaches, electro-chemical sensors, and metagenomic sequencing. The first workshop session addresses recent developments and experiences with regard to marker quantification by qPCR, ddPCR, and EIS-based sensors. The second session has a focus on long-read sequencing and multiplex ddPCR for gene context identification. Each session includes two presentations followed by a discussion of promising applications, benchmarks, and further collaborative research on the technologies.
S2.4F | Tuesday 4th August | 4:00pm-5:30pm
How much do resistomes depend on the antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) annotation pipeline? Recent large-scale comparisons show that ARG detection tools generate markedly different estimates of ARG abundance, richness, and pan- and core-resistome composition from the exact same metagenomic data. This interactive workshop will examine the sources and implications of this variation. Participants will actively contribute to building community guidelines for analysing, interpreting, and communicating resistomes across external and host-associated microbiomes.
Wednesday 5th August
S3.3A | Wednesday 5th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
Environmental monitoring is a vital dimension of One Health strategies to combat the spread of AMR. However, there are multiple methods for monitoring AMR in the environment (culture, qPCR/ddPCR, 'omics) and guidance is needed to inform sampling approaches, to align method and target selection with monitoring objectives and to harmonize measurements with monitoring in other One Health sectors (humans, agriculture, food). This masterclass will feature expert presentations on various AMR monitoring methodologies, their capabilities, limitations, optimisation strategies, and momentum towards reporting standards to support comparable AMR monitoring data and strengthened One Health surveillance. Considerations for HICs and LMICs, as well as future opportunities AI will also be addressed.
S3.3B | Wednesday 5th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
Wildlife carry antimicrobial resistant bacteria at surprisingly high rates – yet they remain at the margins of AMR research. Whether they amplify and spread resistance, suffer pollution from clinical and agricultural systems, or are benign bystanders to the AMR crisis is complex – and critically underexplored.
This interactive workshop aims to bring together EDAR8 participants from all sectors to collaboratively share perspectives and identify and prioritise evidence needed to better understand the intersection of wildlife and AMR.
Participants will leave with a clearer picture of the most critical gaps in wildlife AMR science, insight into where their expertise can contribute, new interdisciplinary connections, and opportunities to shape a coordinated research agenda. Pre-workshop engagement is encouraged, as participant input will shape the workshop agenda.
S3.3C | Wednesday 5th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
This workshop explores the use of antimicrobial agents in veterinary medicine across companion animals, horses, and food-producing animals, with a focus on the factors that influence prescribing practices, regulatory constraints, and antimicrobial stewardship. Through interactive activities and case studies, participants will examine antibiotic mechanisms, environmental persistence, diagnostics, administration routes, withholding periods, and veterinary decision-making. Attendees will gain practical insights into Australian and global approaches to antimicrobial use, strengthen their understanding of One Health principles, and receive resources to support responsible antibiotic stewardship in animal health.
S3.3D | Wednesday 5th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
Microbial communities underpin critical ecosystem functions and play a central role in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), yet microbial endpoints remain under-utilised in environmental guideline values for toxicants. While recent advances have broadened the use of microbial endpoints for deriving antimicrobial hazard concentrations in wastewaters, questions remain regarding their ability to capture AMR risks and broader microbial responses across diverse toxicants and environmental settings. This workshop will convene experts from microbial ecology, AMR, ecotoxicology, water quality and regulation to build a shared understanding of opportunities and challenges associated with microbial endpoints, and identify priorities to support their testing, validation and application across diverse toxicants, ecosystems and regulatory contexts.
S3.3E | Wednesday 5th August | 2:00pm-5:30pm
Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and altered ecosystems are contributing to increased disease incidence and antimicrobial use, accelerating the emergence and spread of drug-resistant infections. This workshop will establish a shared evidence base on how climate change amplifies antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in humans and food-producing animals, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Presentations and a simulation exercise as centred on an escalating climate change and AMR crisis will help participants recognise opportunities for integrated approaches, identify critical knowledge gaps, and strengthen policies. Insights from this workshop will inform the design of resource guidance for integrating a climate change lens into AMR strategies and agendas.
Thursday 6th August
S4.3B | Thursday 6th August | 2:00pm-4:00pm
This workshop explores how emerging omics technologies, ecological insights, and One Health perspectives can strengthen Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in water systems. Participants will examine how metagenomics, microbial ecology, and environmental monitoring data can be translated into actionable risk models for water reuse, recreation, agriculture, and public health protection. Through expert presentations, case studies, and interactive breakout activities, attendees will identify key knowledge gaps, develop sector-specific roadmaps, and advance practical frameworks for integrating AMR evidence into water safety management and decision-making.
S4.3C | Thursday 6th August | 2:00pm-4:00pm
Plasmids and other mobile genetic elements play central roles in the environmental spread of antimicrobial resistance, yet their ecology, mobility, and contribution to future resistance emergence remain difficult to evaluate. This workshop will bring together researchers working on environmental AMR, plasmid biology, microbial ecology, wastewater surveillance, genomics, and bioinformatics. Through short presentations, guided discussion, and breakout activities, participants will explore current methods, key challenges, and future priorities for studying plasmid-mediated AMR across environmental systems, while identifying opportunities for international collaboration and shared resources.
S4.3D | Thursday 6th August | 2:00pm-4:00pm
What if environmental AMR spread is not solely driven by selection and horizontal gene transfer? In environmental ecosystems, AMR dissemination emerges from complex eco-evolutionary trajectories acting across spatio-temporal scales, involving molecular-, cellular- and community-level processes. Their relative significance depends on ecosystem type, stability, resilience, the intensity of external inputs and outputs, and environmental conditions. In this workshop, participants will first collectively identify these ecological processes, and then rank their contribution to shaping AMR dynamics across environments. Building on these insights, participants will discuss how ecological mechanisms can be leveraged for nature-based strategies to mitigate AMR spread.
S4.3E | Thursday 6th August | 11:00am-4:00pm
Antimicrobial resistance is a complex, cross-sectoral challenge that no single discipline can solve alone. This interactive masterclass introduces design thinking as a practical approach for tackling the environmental dimensions of AMR. Through short case studies and hands-on group activities, participants will work through the five phases of design thinking — empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test — using a toolkit being developed by SAAFE CRC with UNEP. Suited to participants across research, policy and industry, the session builds capacity to develop collaborative, innovative solutions to shared AMR problems.
Friday 7th August
S5.1C | Friday 7th August | 9:00am-10:30am
This technical workshop brings together researchers with expertise in molecular microbiology, environmental chemistry, microbial ecology, and quantitative risk assessment to refine a Bayesian Network model for environmental AMR risk. Through structured expert elicitation, participants will help parametrise key uncertain nodes across ARG mobility, chemical selection pressures, and resistance selection mechanisms - filling evidence gaps not well captured by existing datasets. The session will inform how Bayesian approaches can support risk-based decision-making for AMR management across water and reuse systems. Attendance at Dr Claire Hayward’s presentation in S2.2C on Tuesday is mandatory pre-work.
S5.3B | Friday 7th August | 1:30pm-5:30pm
Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is transforming how we track antimicrobial resistance across human, animal, food and environmental systems—yet its use in environmental AMR surveillance remains limited. This workshop introduces ECRs, researchers and decision-makers to the role of culture-based WGS within a One Health framework, and how it complements metagenomics. Through plain-language modules and a guided E. coli case study, participants will build a practical understanding of how WGS data are generated, analysed and interpreted—and where it adds critical resolution beyond metagenomics alone. No prior WGS experience is required.
S5.3C | Friday 7th August | 1:30pm-5:30pm
Workshop for ECR delegates only
Career Pathways Panel: Hear from professionals working across academia, government and industry as they share insights into their career journeys, challenges, opportunities and advice for emerging researchers.
Personal Network Mapping: Reflect on the connections you've built throughout the conference and explore how your professional network supports your career development. This interactive session will help participants identify valuable existing relationships; recognise new connections formed during EDAR8; and consider opportunities for future collaboration.
This workshop has been designed specifically for participants in the ECR Program. If you have registered but are not part of the program, we would be grateful if you would consider releasing your place for an ECR delegate.