Dr Tim Barnett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia and Honorary Research Fellow at the Telethon Kids Institute. His work centres on the disease-causing mechanisms of Streptococcus pyogenes (Group A Streptococcus, Strep A), including molecular interactions with host cells, transcriptional responses to infection, antibiotic resistance and epidemiology.

Dr Barnett has worked in the area of Strep A research since his PhD. He has pursued postdoctoral studies in two of the leading Strep A research laboratories at Emory University (June Scott) and the University of Queensland (Mark Walker), and made a number of significant contributions to this field. These include the first characterisation of the enzymes (sortases) that covalently attach proteins to the Strep A cell wall, demonstration that stationary phase gene expression is mediated by changes in mRNA stability, and the description of a novel mechanism that Strep A uses to evade the innate immune pathway that protects host cells from intracellular bacteria (autophagy).

Dr Barnett's recent work has uncovered entirely new mechanisms of antibiotic resistance that are only active in the context of an infection, and not currently able to be detected in pathology laboratories.