Dr. Brenda Anne Wilson earned her BA degree in biochemistry and German from Barnard College in New York. Her post-baccalaureate DAAD graduate exchange Fellowship in Biochemistry was at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany. She earned her PhD degree in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University as an AAUW doctoral fellow studying antibiotic biosynthesis. She then undertook an NIH postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology at Harvard Medical School. Her first tenured faculty appointment was in Biochemistry at Wright State University School of Medicine, Dayton, Ohio. She is currently Professor of Microbiology and Associate Director of Undergraduate Education in the School of MCB in CLAS; Inaugural Professor of BTS in CI MED; Professor of Pathobiology in CVM; and Senior Faculty Fellow for the National Laboratories in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the AAM Selection Committee, and an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Wilson's current research work focuses on the host-microbe interface, bacterial pathogenesis and bacterial protein toxins, development of anti-toxin and toxin-based cargo-delivery vehicles for therapeutic biologics, comparative and functional genomic technologies and applications involving pathogen evolution, microbiomes and their roles in health and disease, climate change impacts on microbiomes, health, and disease transmission, and development of technologies and applications for detection and risk assessment of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) objects, publications, and activities.