Professor Gene Tyson is a world-renowned expert in culture-independent molecular approaches and bioinformatics for characterising microbial communities. As the Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (ACE) at The University of Queensland, he helped grow the reputation of ACE into an internationally recognised centre for microbial genomics. In January 2020, Professor Tyson was recruited to the Queensland University of Technology as Director of the newly established Centre for Microbiome Research (CMR). Over the last decade, he has been awarded ~$30M in funding including ARC Future Fellowship, Discovery and Linkage grants; US Department of Energy; and various Foundations, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. In 2018, he co-founded a start-up company, Microba, a human microbiome company that focuses on developing new therapeutics from the gut microbiome.