Professor Mark Blaskovich is an ‘antibiotic hunter’ and Director of Translation for the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at The University of Queensland. A medicinal chemist with 15 years of industrial drug development experience, since 2010 he has been developing new antibiotics, non-antibiotic therapies and diagnostics to detect and treat resistant bacterial and fungal infections. He co-founded the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD), a global ‘crowdsourcing’ antibiotic discovery initiative, and has led multiple industry collaborations focused on antibiotic development. He is also Director of a recently established ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Environmental and Agricultural Solutions to Antimicrobial Resistance.

Interests: medicinal chemistry, antibiotic discovery, bacterial imaging