Yunn-Hwen Gan graduated from Purdue University with a B.Sc. (Honours) in Molecular Biology and University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in medical microbiology and immunology. She is currently associate professor at the Department of Biochemistry at the National University of Singapore and the co-chair of the Infectious Diseases Translational Research Program in the School of Medicine. She is a world leading researcher in melioidosis, a disease primarily in the tropics caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei. Her current research focuses on Klebsiella induced liver abscess, a prominent disease in Asia. Her work involves identifying bacterial virulence factors of hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae responsible for causing liver abscess. Her team examines host and bacterial factors that affect gut colonization and translocation, and metastatic spread to other organs. Her recent works have identified the importance of different bacterial virulent factors in causing niche-specific disease, and the alarming trend of the convergence of multidrug resistance and hypervirulence in K. pneumoniae in hospital settings. Her ongoing research investigates what constitutes hypervirulence, and how antibiotic resistance genes on highly evolved and adapted plasmids are spreading among bacterial populations. She has also established multidisciplinary collaborations with chemists, clinicians and computational biologists to examine novel strategies to treat antibiotic resistant Enterobacteriaceae bacteria. One of such strategies is to establish a synthetic commensal community of bacteria to be used as probiotics for decolonization from the gut.