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.