Rate My Professor Mike McDonald

Professor Mike McDonald is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences within Monash University’s Faculty of Science, where he serves as Head of the Experimental Evolution Research Group and Research Director. Originally from New Zealand, he completed his PhD in Evolutionary Genetics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Massey University, in 2009. He then undertook a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, from 2012 to 2016. In 2016, McDonald established his independent laboratory at Monash University. He is a founding member of the Centre to Impact Antimicrobial Resistance (established 2020), leading its Training and Inclusion working group to foster the next generation of AMR experts.

McDonald’s research employs experimental evolution to elucidate the genetics of adaptation in microbes, including bacteria, yeast, and bacteriophages. By evolving populations over thousands of generations in controlled laboratory environments, his group investigates how organisms adapt to antibiotics, environmental shifts, and interspecies interactions, utilizing high-throughput robotic liquid handling, whole genome sequencing, and molecular genetic techniques. Key interests include horizontal gene transfer’s facilitation of resistance spread and potential for reverse evolution, as well as co-evolution dynamics in microbial communities. His influential publications encompass “The dynamics of molecular evolution over 60,000 generations” (Good et al., Nature, 2017), “Sex speeds adaptation by altering the dynamics of molecular evolution” (McDonald et al., Nature, 2016), “Horizontal gene transfer potentiates adaptation by reducing selective constraints on the spread of genetic variation” (Woods et al., PNAS, 2020), and “Horizontal gene transfer facilitates the molecular reverse-evolution of antibiotic sensitivity in experimental populations of H. pylori” (Nguyen et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2024). With more than 3,400 citations, McDonald’s contributions have advanced predictive models for microbial evolution and AMR mitigation strategies. He received Monash University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Diversity and Inclusion Award in 2020.