Biography

Dr Amy Cain has a BSc (Hons I) in Biochemistry and PhD from the University of Sydney (Australia) where she investigated movement of antibiotic resistance genes in Salmonella enterica between animals and humans with Prof. Ruth Hall. Next Amy moved to Cambridge (UK) to work as a research fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with Prof. Julian Parkhill, developing bespoke genomics techniques like TraDIS to examine antibiotic resistance gene networks. Then she moved to Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa, working for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, tracking and sequencing hospital-acquired resistant infections as part of the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Clinical Research Program. After a brief stint in the pharmaceutical industry as a Vertex Fellow (2017-2018) between Oxford, UK and Boston, USA, Amy moved back to academia to establish her own group at Macquarie University, as an ARC DECRA Fellow.

Currently Amy is an ARC Future Fellow, situated across the School of Natural Sciences, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and Applied Biosciences and focuses on developing new antibiotics using functional genomic techniques (ARC DECRA), novel single-cell microfluidics-based methodology (ARC DP), adaptive evolutionary approaches (NHMRC Project). She established and is director the Galleria Research Facility, Australia’s first high-throughput in vivo model (Macquarie University) which is used to assess the pathogenicity of microbes, and the toxicity and efficacy of new drugs. She also uses synthetic biology to create microbes that efficiently degrade various waste materials, like plastics (ARC Future) and metals in collaboration with the US Army.

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