David Burgner is a paediatric infectious disease clinical scientist based at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. He trained in the UK and Australia and did his PhD on genetic susceptibility to severe malaria at Oxford University and in The Gambia. He has chaired the ANZ Paediatric Infectious Diseases Group and was the inaugural Education Officer for the World Society of Paediatric Infectious Diseases. He currently leads the Inflammatory Origins Research Group at MCRI and co-leads the MCRI LifeCourse Initiative, Australia’s largest collection of longitudinal cohorts. His research interests include understanding the differential susceptibility to severe infection and the links between early life infection, inflammation and cardiometabolic risk. He has a longstanding clinical and research interest in Kawasaki disease (KD) and co-founded the International KD Genetics Consortium, which undertook the first GWAS of KD. He is a medical advisor to the Australian KD Foundation.