Professor Kanta Subbarao is a virologist and a physician with specialty training in paediatrics and paediatric infectious diseases. She has worked on molecular virology and vaccine development for emerging viruses that pose a potential pandemic threat, including influenza viruses, SARS and MERS and now SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses in a career spanning 30 years. Previously, she was Chief of the Molecular Genetics Section of the Influenza Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta (1997-2002) and Chief of the Emerging Respiratory Viruses Section of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), NIH in the USA (2002-2016). In November 2016, she moved to Melbourne and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, American Academy of Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She serves on the Editorial Board of PLoS Pathogens, Cell Host and Microbe, Journal of Virology, Med, and Cell.