Dr. Vanessa R. Marcelino works at the interface between microbial ecology, evolution and bioinformatics. She obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from São Paulo State University, and an Erasmus Mundus joint MSc degree from the Universities of Bremen (Germany), Pierre and Marie Curie (France), and Ghent (Belgium), where she worked on the evolution of ecological niches. She moved to Australia and completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2017, focusing on the biodiversity and evolution of microbial communities in coral reefs. Dr. Marcelino then joined Prof. Holmes and Prof. Sorrell at the University of Sydney, where she established new analytical methods to study pathogens within microbial communities. Dr. Marcelino joined the Microbiota and Systems Biology team at the Hudson Institute in 2020, where she has been working on identifying the microbial signatures of disease. She is interested in understanding interactions among organisms from an ecological and evolutionary perspective, especially those interactions that lead to disease or dysbiosis. She is also keen on developing new bioinformatics tools when needed. Using state-of-art ‘omics’ and bioinformatics methods, her research ultimately aims to advance our understanding of the eco-evolutionary processes shaping host-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions.