Dr Meiling Han is an ARC DECRA fellow commencing in 2023 and is doing her research in antimicrobial resistance at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. She completed her PhD in antimicrobial systems pharmacology at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Science in 2018. As a 3-year early career researcher, she has supervised 3 PhD, one master’s and one honours students, and secured numerous grants and awards such as the FMNHS Faculty Bridging Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018-2019), the AINSE Early Career Research Grant (2019-2021), and the Rod Rickards Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences (2019). She was also appointed as Vice Chair for the 2023 Gordon Research Seminar in Metabolomics (Italy). Moreover, she has also achieved a productive research output evidenced by 49 peer-reviewed publications (13 first author, 2 corresponding author) in high-impact journals (e.g., Nat Commun, Nat Microbiol, Adv Sci), with a total of >1100 citations (Google Scholar, Sep 2022).

Dr Han's research has been focused on the relationship between antimicrobial resistance and the remodelling of membrane lipids in Gram-negative bacteria. Over the past 3 years, she has established an independent research program to characterise the chemical compositions and biological functions of essential bacterial lipids and intracellular metabolites using an integrative metabolomics/lpidomics and biophysical approach (e.g., neutron reflectometry). During this process she has established solid and extensive research skills in pharmacology and biochemistry, in particular, bacterial membrane lipidomics, an emerging field with only a handful of researchers in the world. Her research findings have enriched our knowledge of small molecules within bacteria and will inform the future discovery of much-needed antimicrobials.