Professor Deborah Williamson is a Clinical and Public Health Microbiologist, Director of Microbiology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Deputy Director of the Microbiological Diagnostic Unit Public Health Laboratory at the Doherty Institute, and a laboratory head in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. She is Co-Head of Public Health at the Doherty Institute, and co-chair of the Communicable Diseases Genomics Network.

Her research group at the Doherty Institute focuses on the application of genomic technologies to public health, with a strong focus on antimicrobial-resistant pathogens. Professor Williamson is an NHMRC Investigator Grant recipient, who has published over 130 papers since 2011. She received the Vice Chancellors’ Award for best Doctoral Thesis at the University of Auckland in 2016 for her PhD on bacterial genomics, and a L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Fellowship in 2017. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Microbial Genomics, and is regularly invited nationally and internationally to speak on the application of genomics to public health.