Dr Simone Li

AMR IMPACT THEME

  • AMR Evolution and Protective Microbiomes

EXPERTISE

  • Computational biology and bioinformatics
  • Microbial ecology and the microbiome
  • Metagenomics
  • Systems biology
  • Research that bridges discovery and translational sciences

Simone is an NHMRC CJ Martin Early Career Research Fellow and leads the new Microbiome Systems research group at the Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). Her journey in research began with a Bachelor of Engineering with first-class honours in Bioinformatics from the University of New South Wales (Sydney), specialising in biological data integration and network biology. She was a founding member of the NSW Systems Biology Initiative, headed by Prof Marc Wilkins, one of the Bioinformatics Platforms in Australia. Awarded a prestigious scholarship by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, she relocated to Germany to do her PhD, where her research focus transitioned into metagenomics and connecting the human microbiome to health. This was continued by a biotechnology-driven postdoc at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (Denmark) that was supported by a competitive EMBO Fellowship. Dr Li has led highly-impactful and multi-national research collaborations that uniquely combined the expertise of clinicians, microbiologists and computational biologists and culminated in recent first authorships in Science and Nature Medicine.

Dr Simone Li and her team use bioinformatics, microbiomics and machine learning approaches to study microbial communities in their native ecosystems and create data-oriented methods to analyse and disentangle the biological complexity contained within them. One focus will be to look at how microbes collectively respond to human-mediated interventions, such as antimicrobial use, and identify ways we can leverage this information to enable improved and rational design of sustainable microbiome-based therapeutic and remediation strategies.

AMR FOCUS

  • How do we detect agents of AMR in microbial communities?
  • How prevalent are AMR genes in the human microbiome and other natural environments?
  • Why do microbes keep them, even in the absence of antimicrobials?
  • Do human activities encourage the spread of AMR genes in the community?

IMPACT

  • Better methods to detect and predict the onset and spread of AMR-related disease
  • Knowledge gain that will influence policy and practice of current antimicrobial strategies
  • Novel therapeutic approaches to tackle drug-resistant infections