Dr. Bassler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Dr. Bassler received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University. She performed postdoctoral work in Genetics at the Agouron Institute, and she joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. The research in her laboratory focuses on the molecular mechanisms that bacteria use for intercellular communication, which is a process called quorum sensing. Dr. Bassler teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses at Princeton University. She directed the Molecular Biology Graduate Program from 2002-2008 and she currently chairs Princeton University’s Council on Science and Technology. She is the President of the American Society for Microbiology; the largest life-sciences organization in the world. Dr. Bassler was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2002. She was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2002 and made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004. Dr. Bassler was given the 2003 Theobald Smith Society Waksman Award and is the 2006 recipient of the American Society for Microbiology’s Eli Lilly Investigator Award for fundamental contributions to microbiological research. In 2008, Dr. Bassler was awarded Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the 2009 recipient of the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Science. Dr. Bassler is an editor for Molecular Microbiology, the chief editor for Annual Reviews of Genetics, and an associate editor for Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Cell and Journal of Bacteriology. Among other duties, Dr. Bassler serves on advisory, grant, fellowship, and award review panels for the National Academy of Science, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, American Society for Microbiology, American Academy of Microbiology, Keck Futures Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Trust, Jane Coffin Child Foundation, and the Max Planck Society.