Mr Nevio Sarmento

Nevio Sarmento is a microbiologist from Timor-Leste (TL) and a PhD student at Menzies. His PhD on nasopharyngeal bacterial carriage in high-risk hospitalised Timorese children with malnutrition or pneumonia, is funded by a Charles Darwin University Research Training Scholarship. Through his PhD, Nevio has led the development of standardised methods for sample collection, storage, culture, and antimicrobial susceptibility testing in pneumococcal bacteriology at the National Health Laboratory (NHL) in TL.  

Since April 2021, he chairs the TL National Immunisation Technical Advisory Group (NITAG-TL) pneumococcal vaccine sub-committee where he assisted the government to implement a pneumococcal vaccine program. Prior to his PhD studies, Nevio Sarmento worked at NHL for more than 10 years and helped re-establish the microbiology laboratory in 2015. He continues to mentor to several laboratory scientists at NHL. He was the director for Diagnostic and Therapeutic Services at Hospital Nacional Guido Valadares, Dili, TL (2017-19). He has worked on multiple collaborative projects mainly with Menzies School of Health Research and other international partners and has published several articles on antimicrobial resistance, infectious diseases, and vaccine preventable diseases in TL. He regularly provides technical advice on health system and laboratory system development to the NHL and Ministry of Health in Timor-Leste.