Dam is a PhD student at the Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the London School ofHygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

His research focuses on the interaction between the upperairway microbiome and the carriage of Streptococcus pneumoniae in older children in The Gambia.He employs computational and statistical methods to understand microbiome diversity, differential abundance, and network interactions among carriers and non-carriers of S. pneumoniae. He is also investigating how environmental exposure to air pollution impacts the carriage of S. pneumoniae in the same population.

Damhas more than seven years of laboratory experience at the WHO Collaborating Center for New Vaccine Surveillance, hosted at the Medical Research Council Unit in The Gambia at LSHTM. He has extensively leveraged molecular biology and microbiology tools to characterize S. pneumoniae from countries across West and Central Africa as part of a routine invasive bacterial disease surveillance network. Furthermore, he is involved in the molecular diagnosis of other pathogens causing vaccine-preventable diseases, such as Neisseria meningitidis and Haemophilus influenzae, as well as enteric pathogens, to monitor the efficacy of vaccines routinely administered in Expanded Programs of Immunization. He also teaches molecular diagnostics of encapsulated bacteria as part of the Wellcome Genome Campus Advanced Course on Molecular Approaches to Clinical Microbiology in Africa.