Dr. Omar El-Halfawy is a Canada Research Chair in Chemogenomics and Antimicrobial Research and Assistant Professor in Biochemistry at the University of Regina from August 2020. His research group is actively working towards solutions for the current antibiotic crisis. His team employs an interdisciplinary approach encompassing microbiology, biochemistry, molecular and chemical biology, and chemogenomics to uncover novel antibiotic resistance and microbial virulence mechanisms and discover new antimicrobial strategies. His lab has received more than $1.5 Million in Federal, Provincial, and Institutional operating and infrastructure funding to date. He is a Delegate to the Canadian Federal Parliament as part of the Science Meets Parliament Program. El-Halfawy received his B.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Faculty of Pharmacy, Alexandria University, Egypt, in 2005 and then briefly worked as a community pharmacist. He then obtained an M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Microbiology from Alexandria University in 2009. In 2010, he moved to Canada and completed his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology at Dr. Miguel Valvano’s lab at the University of Western Ontario in 2014, focusing on mechanisms of intrinsic antibiotic resistance mediated by metabolites and other bacterial small molecules. El-Halfawy then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Dr. Eric Brown’s lab at the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, where he explored novel solutions to target multi-drug resistant bacteria.