Dr Michelle Baker is a senior research scientist at CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) in Geelong, Victoria and an ARC Future fellow. Dr Baker has expertise in comparative immunology and immunogenetics gained through a PhD at the University of Queensland and subsequent postdoctoral training at the University of New Mexico. She returned to Australia in 2008 and currently leads a research group investigating the nature of the immune response of bats to viral infection. Bats are natural host reservoirs for a variety of emerging and re-emerging viruses, many of which result in mortality in humans and other species yet rarely result in clinical consequences in bats. Understanding how bats control viral replication could lead to new antiviral strategies and identification of new therapeutic targets. Dr Baker has been involved in a number of high profile projects, including participating in the analysis of the first marsupial whole genome sequence from the South American opossum, Monodelphis domestica and the two bat genome project recently published in Science.