Aaron Darling is an Associate Professor in Computational Genomics and Bioinformatics in the ithree institute at UTS. He has over a decade of experience developing computational methods for comparative genomics and evolutionary modeling and in 2013 moved from the University of California-Davis to start a computational genomics group at UTS. Darling embarked on his research career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, he worked with members of the UW-Madison Genome Center to sequence and analyze the first genomes of pathogenic E. coli. During this time Darling led the development of some widely used computational methods for analysing genomic data, including the mpiBLAST open source parallel BLAST software and the Mauve software for comparing multiple genome sequences. Following the award of a Ph.D. at UW-Madison, Darling received a fellowship from the US National Science Foundation to pursue postdoctoral studies at The University of Queensland. After two years at UQ he then returned to UC Davis to develop a research program in computational metagenomics -- the study of uncultivated microorganisms from the environment using computational methods. Darling now brings his experience to understand the relationship between humans and microorganisms in collaboration with microbiologists at the ithree institute.