Dr Lisa Mielke is a Victorian Cancer Agency Fellow and Head of the Mucosal Immunity and Cancer laboratory at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute and School of Cancer Medicine La Trobe University. Dr Mielke is an expert in immune cell biology in intestinal homeostasis and gastrointestinal cancers. She completed her PhD in 2009 at the National Institutes of Health, USA. She performed her postdoctoral studies at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. During this time, she led numerous studies revealing new and exciting cross-talk between our diet and transcriptional regulation of intestinal innate lymphoid cells (ILC) and gd T cell populations. These studies opened an exciting frontier of research in the field of mucosal immunology, that underpin her current work studying these cells in maintaining homeostasis of the gut, their role in gastrointestinal infection and cancers.