Dr Siti Aisah Alias is an expert in the areas of marine and polar sciences. Her research fields include biodiversity and phylo biogeography, antimicrobial activity and cold-adapted enzymes and biochemistry of marine derived fungi and polar soil micro fungi. Her work is important to understand climate change and organisms in particular latitudinal studies in fungal response to temperature and UV stress. She leads various research projects as a Principal Investigator, and has formed many research linkages with many scientists and collaborative partners including from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Polish Polar Research (PPR), and Instituto Antartico Chileno (IAC). She first started out as a marine mycologist, having discovered many novel marine fungal species early in her career before lending her hand to establish the Malaysian Antarctic Research Programme (MARP) in 2007. She is instrumental in assisting the development of the Antarctic Treaty under a grant from MOHE for the development of Science and Policy in Antarctic (2011 – 2016). This is to forge and strengthen Malaysia’s presence in the politics and science of Antarctica. She has published significant number of papers in high impact journals that related to biodiversity, bioactive metabolites, biological activities and chemistry of marine fungi. (H-index = 14 (Scopus), with citations = 916). She has actively participated in MARP’s outreach programme called ‘Malaysia’s Journey to the Ice: Women in Antarctica’ to promote awareness of Antarctica to undergraduate students and secondary school pupils in Malaysia. Her contributions to marine and polar science was recognised when she was awarded the National Young Scientist Award, Ministry of Science, Technology and Environmental, Malaysia (2001), Science and Technology Research Grant from the Toray Science Foundation (2005), and a Fellowship from the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan, UNESCO, Paris (2008).