Rate My Professor Phillip Bergen

Dr. Phillip Bergen is a Senior Research Fellow in Microbiology and Lecturer at the Centre for Medicine Use and Safety within the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Monash University. He holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy (Honours) and a PhD, conferred in 2013, for which he received the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal for Excellence for his thesis titled 'Towards optimising use of colistin against Pseudomonas aeruginosa'. Prior to entering academia in 2004, Bergen worked as a clinical pharmacist. His academic career at Monash includes teaching contributions, such as co-leading the Clinical Pharmacy I A unit in 2006 and developing an online pharmaceutical calculations learning module published in Pharmacy Education in 2011. He is also involved in antimicrobial stewardship programs and initiatives like the Return Unwanted Medicines Project to reduce the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals.

Bergen's research centers on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of antibiotics, with a focus on optimizing dosing and combination therapies for polymyxins such as colistin, fosfomycin, and others against multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. His studies address antimicrobial resistance mechanisms, phage resistance, neurotoxicity, and population pharmacokinetics in clinical settings. Key publications include 'Dosing of colistin - back to basic PK/PD' (2012), 'In vitro pharmacodynamics of fosfomycin against clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa' (2015, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy), 'Clinically relevant concentrations of fosfomycin combined with colistin and/or doripenem display synergistic killing and optimised pharmacodynamics in multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa' (2016, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy), 'Model-Informed Dose Optimisation of Polymyxin-Rifampicin Combination Therapy Against Carbapenem-Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii' (2023), 'Population Pharmacokinetics of Nebulized Polymyxin B in Epithelial Lining Fluid of Critically Ill Patients' (2025), and 'Phage Resistance Bidirectionally Altered Antibiotic Susceptibility in Klebsiella pneumoniae via galE mutation' (2026). With 94 publications cited over 3700 times, his work significantly influences strategies for treating infections caused by superbugs.