Fighting Multidrug Resistance with Herbal Extracts, Essential Oils and Their Components

Prof. Mahendra Rai is a UGC Basic Science Research Faculty Fellow and former Head of the Department of Biotechnology at Sant Gadge Baba Amravati University, India. He is currently a senior visiting professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Federal University of Piaui (UFPI), Brazil. His areas of expertise include microbial biotechnology and nanobiotechnology, focusing on the green synthesis of metal nanoparticles using fungi and their applications as nanoantimicrobials against pathogenic microbes. His research is interdisciplinary, integrating microbial biotechnology with nanotechnology. Professor Rai has received several prestigious awards, including the Father T.A. Mathias Award from the All India Association for Christian Higher Education and the Medini Award from the Government of India. He has participated in multiple international collaborations and has held visiting positions at various institutions, including the University of Geneva (Switzerland), Debrecen University (Hungary), and Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland).

Dr. Kateryna Kon, MD, PhD, currently works at the Department of Microbiology, Virology and Immunology at Kharkiv National Medical University, Kharkiv, Ukraine as an Associate Professor. Dr. Kon received the Best Young Scientist of Kharkiv Award in 2007. She has ten years of teaching and fifteen years of research experience. She is an editorial board member of six international peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Kon's scientific contributions include more than 100 publications, 6 books and 18 scientific articles. The main focus of Dr. Kon’s research is antibiotic resistance in bacteria, coping with microbial resistance by plant essential oils and nanoparticles, microbiology of surgical and gynaecological infections, application of different statistical methods to analysis of biomedical data.