Nouri L. Ben Zakour is a senior post-doctoral researcher specialised in Microbial and Evolutionary Genomics, working at the Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre, University of Queensland. She did her PhD in Bioinformatics at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, on the bacterial genome variability of Staphylococcus aureus. In 2006, she moved to Scotland to hold a postdoctoral position at the University of Edinburgh, to study the genomic basis of host adaptation in staphylococcal species. Late 2009, she joined Dr. Scott Beatson’s Microbial Genomics Group at the University of Queensland, to expand her research to other bacterial pathogens of medical and veterinary importance. Her interests range from population genetics and evolutionary genomics to functional genomics, to investigate bacterial outbreaks, and more fundamentally, understand how pathogenic bacteria evolve to colonize new ecological niches. Her work focuses not solely on evolutionary and epidemiological questions, but also on more applied issues such as risk factors surveillance, and therapeutic targets mining.