Ursula Reinstein

Ursula I. Reinstein (née Heczko) (born May 1964) is an Austrian veterinarian and a microbiological researcher.
Early life and education
Born in Lohr am Mein, Germany, she grew up in Munich. She attended the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and completed her doctoral thesis in cancer research, culminating in a peer-reviewed publication in the British Veterinary Journal on the sequence of an exon of the feline p53 gene-mutation in a lymphosarcoma.
Career
Reinstein spent time in a small animal veterinary practice in Vienna but was more drawn by microbiology research and food-borne diseases. She was appointed the food control officer for the city of Vienna during the 1990s.
In 1998 she began a post-doctoral position in the biotechnology laboratory of Brett Finlay OC OBC FRSC, an expert on the molecular understanding of the ways bacteria infect their hosts, at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. During her three-year tenure, Reinstein published six peer-reviewed scientific papers.
While at UBC, Dr. Heczko discovered a potentially novel probiotic means of preventing infection by E. coli. After failing repeatedly to achieve a standard model of infection by inoculation of enteropathogenic Escherichia coli into a set of experimental rabbits, she took it upon herself to perform electron microscope studies in order to try to understand why these animals were seemingly immune to the pathogen. This led her to discovery of and later publishing that segmented filamentous bacteria prevent colonization of enteropathogenic Escherichia coli O103 in rabbits, making the cover of the The Journal of Infectious Diseases. She continues to work in research-related activity at the London Vision Clinic, where she has been a director since 2007.<ref name="CompanieshouseAppointments"/>

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