Amy K. Cain is an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Molecular Biology in the School of Natural Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research focuses on developing new-to-nature antibiotics and uncovering bacterial stress response systems in hospital pathogens using functional genomic techniques, novel single-cell microfluidics-based methodology and adaptive evolutionary approaches. She is Director of the Galleria Research Facility, an ethical and cost-effective in vivo model for testing pathogenicity of microbes, and toxicity and efficacy of new drugs. She has worked in academic groups, hospital labs and in the pharmaceutical industry across Australia, Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, Malawi (sub-Saharan Africa), and Boston (USA), researching broad topics including movement of food-borne pathogens from animals to humans, genomics technology development, hospital outbreak tracking and drug development.