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. She currently maintains honorary appointments at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, the University of Melbourne, and La Trobe University. She is an expert in immune cell biology in intestinal homeostasis and gastrointestinal cancers and obtained her PhD from the National Institutes of Health, USA, in 2009, before performing her postdoctoral studies at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. She led numerous studies during this time that revealed correlations between our diet and the transcriptional regulation of intestinal innate lymphoid cell (ILC) and gd T cell populations. These studies opened up an exciting new frontier of research in the field of mucosal immunology, which underpins her current work studying the role of these cells in gastrointestinal cancers.