Emily Furlong completed a BSc and Honours at the University of Queensland before undertaking a PhD at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience. Her PhD research focused on the structural and functional characterisation of an understudied class of copper resistance proteins from the uropathogen Proteus mirabilis. During her PhD, she spent 6 months at the University of Oxford learning cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Emily loved Oxford so much that she returned as a postdoctoral researcher in 2019 and spent two years continuing her cryo-EM training. During these two years, she worked on the structural characterisation of the bacterial flagellar motor. In 2021, Emily returned to Australia and worked with Dr Alastair Stewart at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute on bacterial ATP synthases. She became a lecturer and established her own lab in the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University in 2023.