Dr Brianna Atto is an early-career researcher at the University of Tasmania (Australia) supported by a Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Foundation Junior Fellowship. She graduated from the University of Tasmania with an Honours degree in Biomedical Science in 2017, and has developed a strong clinical background with 7 years' experience across a variety of medical science disciplines. Her research interests are in pathogen–host interactions, antimicrobial resistance, and the management of infections in chronic respiratory disease. Currently, her research is focused on the development of novel therapies against respiratory pathogens and biofilms.

Yitayal Anteneh is a Medical Biotechnologist and Microbiologist with vast health and applied microbiology research experience. He received his BSc in Medical Laboratory Technology at Jimma University, Ethiopia in 2005, MSC in Medical Microbiology at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia in 2010, and PhD in Medical Biotechnology at Flinders University, Australia in 2020. For more than a decade, he worked at the University of Gondar and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia from the level of Graduate Assistant to Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences and Microbiology. He also served as a member of the ethical review and educational quality assurance committee and supervised several graduate and postgraduate students of Medical Microbiology and Laboratory Sciences. His research interests are antimicrobial resistance, host–pathogen interaction, the discovery of new drugs and diagnostic methods for hard-to-treat infectious diseases, and the use of phage as an alternative to common antimicrobials.

Dr. Seweryn Bialasiewicz has worked at the Royal Children’s Hospital and now Children’s Health Queensland HHS for over 17 years conducting translational research and clinical support centering on infectious disease (primarily viral and bacterial) molecular diagnostics, general microbiology, and molecular epidemiology. Since 2019, he has shared his time between CHQ HHS and The University of Queensland’s Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, expanding on a growing interest in the microbial ecology of the human body, it’s role in health and disease, and ways to manipulated to achieve desirable outcomes. Ongoing work includes the leveraging of emerging technologies to explore hidden microbial diversity and their interactions in the human body, as well as using the technology to develop rapid diagnostic tests (e.g.: with capacity to dramatically reduce the time to both identify and characterise the antibiotic resistance of life-threatening bacterial blood infections). In particular, he is interested in leveraging emerging technology to explore the hidden diversity of microorganisms that may not have been well characterised in particular body sites or have been missed due to limitations of traditional techniques.

Michael J Binks is a senior research fellow and program leader within the Child Health Division at Menzies School of Health Research. He received his Bachelor of Science from Monash University, in 1996, Bachelor of Health Sciences (Natural Medicine) from the Australian College of Natural Medicine in 2006, and a PhD from Charles Darwin University in 2015. With expertise in biomedical science, clinical trials, and epidemiology, he leads a collaborative and multidisciplinary research program dedicated to achieving sustainable improvements in the respiratory health of Indigenous children. For this collective body of innovative work, he was recently awarded the Charles Darwin University Prize for Exceptional Performance in Research. He currently supervises and has successfully supervised several PhD students to completion on projects including ‘Safety of vaccination in pregnancy’ and the ‘Microbiology of otitis media among Indigenous Australian children'. His research themes include child and maternal health and respiratory immunology.

Mostafa Hashemi is a research assistant and PhD student at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. He received his B.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering at Shiraz University. His research during his bachelor’s study was focused on computational Systems Biology, which was about investigating the feasibility of rhamnolipids biosynthesis by Pseudomonas bacteria. Afterwards, he continued his studies by achieving an M.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, again in Chemical Engineering. His focus in this stage of his research is on modelling, simulation, and control of chemical, biomedical, and biological systems. In his master’s thesis, he developed a mathematical model for the cardiovascular system (heart and blood circulation), respiratory system, and central nervous system (CNS).

Dr. Jane Hill is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The University of British Columbia in Canada. She grew up in rural New South Wales, Australia. Her high school years were spent in Grenfell, the birthplace of the famous Australian poet Henry Lawson. After moving to the US and finishing a BS in Chemical Engineering and technical MBA (both at Rensselaer), she ran a small bioremediation company in central New York State for a few years. However, she wanted to know more about the microorganisms that underpinned the transformations of pollutants in the soil. She completed her PhD at Yale University with Water Treatment Technologist Menachem Elimelech and then worked with Biotechnologist Jordan Peccia at Yale for her post-doctoral experience. She spent over a decade measuring and evaluating how organic phosphorus compounds were cycled in the environment before turning her attention to infectious diseases and metabolomics.

Ruth B Thornton (BSc, PhD) is a Passe and Williams mid-career Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and Co-Lead of the Bacterial Respiratory Infectious Disease Group at the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases, based at the Telethon Kids Institute. Her research interests lie in understanding the interactions between bacteria and the host in chronic and recurrent respiratory infections including ear, nose, and throat infections, and chronic lung disease. Her research into the role of bacterial biofilms, intracellular persistence, and host–immunity in recurrent middle ear infections (otitis media) has changed paradigms in understanding and treating otitis media. Her expertise further lies in developing pediatric-focused, laboratory-based research platforms critical to unravel the pathologic mechanisms of respiratory tract infections and the impact of vaccines. These include small-volume immune assays and specialist microscopy techniques, which are now core techniques within her laboratory. These all contribute to her overall goal of understanding host–microbial interactions, and why certain therapies may or may not work in high-risk populations, so as to improve treatment and prevention of chronic respiratory infections.

Jacob Westaway is a bioinformatician at the Menzies School of Health Research. He received his Bachelor of Biomedical Science at Griffith University in 2012, Honours in Biomedical Science at Griffith University in 2013, and a PhD at James Cook University in 2022. He has experience in using genomics and computational methods. For his PhD, Jacob used such methods to investigate the gut microbiome of preterm infants born in North Queensland, Australia, exploring its relationship to a host of clinical factors and the impact of early life probiotic prophylaxis. At Menzies, Jacob is now using genomic and computational methods to investigate the population structure, transmission, and epidemiology of several Plasmodium species, with a focus on the zoonotic Plasmodium knowlesi parasite.

Associate Professor Robyn Marsh is a Principal Research Fellow at the Child and Maternal Health Division, Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, Australia. She received her BAppSc(MLS) from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1994, her MSc ftom Northern Territory University in 2001, and her PhD from Charles Darwin University in 2012. Her research aims to improve understanding of microbial factors that contribute to the onset, progression, and persistence of chronic lung and middle ear infections affecting children. She is specifically interested in understanding how bacteria in complex polymicrobial communities contribute to the onset and progression of chronic mucosal infections.