Michele S. Swanson was born and raised in the Midwest, majored in biology at Yale, and discovered biomedical research as a laboratory technician at Rockefeller University. She fell in love with microbial genetics while earning a Master's at Columbia and her doctorate at Harvard Medical School and became captivated by microbial pathogenesis as a postdoc at Tufts University School of Medicine. At the University of Michigan Medical School, her research group investigates how metabolic and environmental cues govern the life cycle of the intracellular pathogen Legionella pneumophila.
Gemma Reguera is a native of Spain, where she majored in biological sciences at the University of Oviedo. As a Master's student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she discovered her passion for environmental microbiology and later earned a doctorate in microbiology before moving to Harvard Medical School as a postdoc to study the ecology of infectious diseases. At Michigan State University, she studies microbial energy conversions and physiologies of environmental relevance, particularly those that can be harnessed for applications in bioenergy and bioremediation.
Moselio Schaechter was born in Italy, lived in Ecuador as a teen, and obtained his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent most of his academic life at Tufts University School of Medicine, then moved to San Diego in 1995. His research interests involve aspects of bacterial physiology, including growth rate regulation, membrane biology, and chromosome transactions. Frederick C. Neidhardt was born in Philadelphia, majored in biology at Kenyon College in Ohio, and received his doctorate at Harvard University.
He has held academic posts at Harvard, Purdue University, and the University of Michigan. His research has focused on catabolite repression, growth rate regulation, amino acyl-tRNA synthetases, and heat shock and other global networks.