Professor John Bowman was recently the Leader of the Centre for Food Safety and Innovation within the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture at the University of Tasmania. He has expertise in interdisciplinary applications of microbiology, and his research spans the areas of food microbiology, food production systems (soil through to aquaculture), microbial ecology (especially cold ecosystems and less cold places such as in Tasmania), microbial systematics, and functional genomics. He has authored more than 200 journal articles and book chapters, including contributions to significant texts in microbiology such as The Prokaryotes and Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology. He has supervised more than 50 PhD graduates. He received the Australian Society for Microbiology Frank Fenner Award (2002) for outstanding research achievements in microbiological research.