Emily Grace

Emily is a Research Associate in Phage Gene Regulation at the Flinders Accelerator for Microbiome Exploration (FAME). Her research interests span phage ecology and evolution, host–phage interactions, and the development of phage-based solutions for health and agricultural applications. She completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2025, where she examined the population and coevolutionary dynamics of bacterial tree pathogens and their bacteriophages. Her current work focuses on uncovering novel molecular signals that induce prophage activation in diverse bacterial taxa. In parallel, she works on developing molecular assays to characterise the DNA-binding and cleaving activities of phage proteins, with the goal of assigning functions to previously uncharacterised proteins encoded within phage genomes.