Brett Lidbury is a Science Honours graduate from the University of Newcastle and completed his Ph.D. (Immunobiology) at The Australian National University (ANU) in 1993. Since graduation he has conducted research at other Australian universities and in the United States, primarily on virus-host interaction, and remains active in university education. Brett is currently the Associate Professor of Alternatives to Animal Research (and The Medical Advances Without Animals Trust (MAWA) Fellow) at the ANU, based at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. In pursuing medical progress without animal models, machine-learning applications to massive human datasets are being investigated as a key component to an alternative system for fundamental biomedical research.