Dr. Ritika Kar Bahal is a BrightSpark Early Career Child Health Research fellow at the Marshall Centre for Infection and Immunity at the University of Western Australia. She completed her PhD in Tuberculosis research from University of Delhi, India on vaccine development. She relocated from India to Perth in 2019 and started her post-doctoral research in clinical microbiology at the Marshall Centre, UWA. Her current research explores the role of the early life microbiome and bacterial-bacterial interactions in respiratory illnesses in children. She co-leads the work on identification of candidate strains for live biotherapeutic development for respiratory tract infection with Prof. Mark Nicol. Throughout her career, Dr. Bahal has received several prestigious scholarships and awards, both national and international, such as the BrightSpark ECCHR fellowship 2024, the Nature microbiome accelerator award 2024 and the FEMS ECR talk award at ASM National meeting 2024. She has published in high impact journals including The Lancet microbe and npj vaccines. Dr. Bahal is very passionate about community representation in her research and her research goals are developed together with a team of community research buddies.