Dr Lauren Cowley is a senior lecturer in microbial genomics and bioinformatics in the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. Lauren joined the university as prize fellow of bioinformatics in 2018, progressed to lecturer in 2022 and senior lecturer in 2023. Lauren’s background is in public health and genomic epidemiology. She has worked on several international outbreaks, including implementing real-time genomic surveillance during the West Africa Ebola outbreak and working as an embedded scientist on the COVID-19 Taskforce in the UK Cabinet Office. She also previously worked at Public Health England (now UKHSA) in the Gastrointestinal Bacteria Reference Unit. Her research centres around genomic epidemiology, GWAS and machine learning for microbial genomics. She regularly collaborates with UKHSA to apply the latest technological advances to their vast wealth of genomic surveillance data on enteric pathogens.