Professor Tim Stinear is a molecular microbiologist and research-teaching academic who studies bacterial pathogenesis in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne. He is Deputy Head of Department, co-lead of the Centre for Pathogen Genomics at the University of Melbourne and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Mycobacterium ulcerans. He is a National Health and Medical Research Council Senior Investigator fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and fellow of the Australian Society for Microbiology. Tim did his PhD at Monash University in 2001, followed by a three-year postdoctoral period at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. Since then, he has focussed efforts on the application of genomics to study bacteria of human health significance.