Professor David Fairlie is Head of the 200 strong Division of Chemistry and Structural Biology in the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. He was an undergraduate at University of Adelaide, did postgraduate research in chemistry at Australian National University in Canberrra and University of New South Wales, postdoctoral research at Stanford University and University of Toronto. He is a Senior Principal Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and previously an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. He is node leader of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, which is aimed at understanding the molecular basis of immunity and a chief investigator of the Centre for Inflammation and Disease Research. He has founded or co-founded 4 startup companies, consulted heavily with pharmaceutical companies in USA and Europe and raised $150M in R&D funding. David’s interests are at interfaces of chemistry and biology, especially drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology and immunology. He has published 380 journal articles in multiple branches of chemistry (medicinal, biological, organic, inorganic, computational) and biology (biochemistry, pharmacology, immunology, virology, neurobiology, oncology, parasitology) and has trained over 100 postgraduate students for careers in academia, industry, government and hospitals. His research group of 32 are half medicinal/organic chemists and half cell biologists, immunologists and pharmacologists that work on chemical design, synthesis and structure to modulate protein-protein interactions, cell signalling pathways and animal models of human disease.