Amy K. Cain is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor of Molecular Biology in the School of Natural Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology at Macquarie University, Sydney. 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). Her current research focuses on developing new-to-nature antibiotics and uncovering bacterial stress response systems in hospital pathogens using functional genomic techniques. She is the founder and 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.