The Uppsala Antibiotic Center welcomes its new director

After 9 years of operations run under the leadership of Professor Dan Andersson, the UAC starts a new chapter in 2026 with Professor Linus Sandegren as director. We sit down with him to talk about his view on this new role and what lies ahead for our center.

When Linus stepped into the role of director on January 1st, the change did not arrive with a sense of rupture. Instead, it felt like a natural next step in a story that has been unfolding for years. For many at UAC, this transition will likely feel familiar, not because nothing will change, but because the foundation is already there.

“It feels like a continuation, but with a different title.” Linus reflects, only a couple of weeks into his new role. This feeling makes sense since he has been deeply involved with the UAC from the very beginning. In fact, he has been part of the center since before it officially existed, when antibiotic resistance research at Uppsala was still being mapped through discussions, workshops, and shared questions across faculties and departments.

That long perspective is the stepping stone for him in this new role, where the focus is not about reimagining UAC, but about strengthening what has been proven to work.

From timely beginnings to a stable core

Looking back, Linus often returns to the year 2015. It was the moment when antimicrobial resistance stopped being mostly talked about within research circles to something politicians and decision-makers could no longer ignore. The Uppsala Health Summit focused on antibiotic resistance, the WHO adopted its first Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, and the O’Neill report was on the horizon. Conversations were taking place at a scale never seen before for this global health issue.

“It was very timely to start the center then” Linus says, recalling the launch of UAC in the middle of this global momentum.

Since those early days, many things have evolved, but one element, though, has remained firmly at the core of UAC’s identity: the research school. The research school is where much of UAC’s energy comes from. The PhD students themselves shape activities through their projects, their questions, and their need to understand antimicrobial resistance from angles far beyond their own experiments. With now three overlapping cohorts of students, they learn actively from each other, both formally and informally, and sometimes even without realizing how much knowledge is exchanged in those interactions.

“These are the people that almost always show up,” Linus notes, “and that is what really drives the activities”.

A broader community brings a wider perspective

More recently, the UAC has started to grow beyond its original structure. The newly started UAC Research Community now brings together postdocs, group leaders, senior researchers, and even retired colleagues who still want to stay engaged.

For Linus, this expansion is a strategy needed to effectively keep supporting the antimicrobial research community. It is very easy that research environments become narrow in their thinking when everyone asks similar questions and uses similar tools. Being exposed to other disciplines, methodologies, and research questions is where new ideas arise.

“You get exposed to other people’s ways of thinking” Linus explains. “Then you can learn from that”.

Many collaborations within UAC did not begin with a formal plan. They began when someone listened to a talk outside their immediate field and recognized a connection they had not been looking for. Creating these chance interactions is an important goal for a multidisciplinary center.

Moving beyond borders

Another priority in his mandate is mobility and exchange, turning it into something practical and accessible. The Nordic AMR Center Alliance plays a key role here, where several centers across the Nordic countries work on related questions, often with similar structures and challenges.

“There are a number of centers around the Nordic countries that do similar things” Linus says. “We would gain a lot from becoming more interconnected”.

Rather than long traditional sabbaticals, the UAC has set aside funds to bring international researchers to Uppsala on shorter exchanges that fit into busy academic lives. These visits lower the threshold to engage in them and allow the participant researchers to expand their networks effectively.

Reaching across disciplines at Uppsala

Linus also wants the UAC to be more visible within our own university. Antimicrobial resistance does not belong to a single discipline, even if medicine and pharmacy remain central in the understanding and management of resistant bacteria.

Some of the answers to the most pressing questions sit elsewhere. Social sciences help explain why people act the way they do, and health economics helps answer questions that shape political decisions, for example.

“What is the cost to society of not having active antibiotics?” Linus asks.

Without those answers, it becomes harder to argue for long-term solutions. This year, UAC plans to visit faculties across the university, not only to present its work, but to listen and identify where existing research could connect to antimicrobial resistance in meaningful ways.

A question to drive the work forward

As UAC continues into this next chapter, Linus leaves members with a set of questions rather than a directive.

“What is the next big step in your research topic? What is unexplored, and how would something from another discipline help you with this?”.

The answer does not always come when you sit down to think hard about it, but, as Linus himself has experienced, it can come while listening to someone else describe their work, or casually discussing something with a colleague.

“That’s when ideas really come” Linus says.

UAC’s role is to make sure those moments happen, and the rest of the story is shaped by our members.