Kelly Hughes is Professor Ordinaire at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. After receiving a BS degree from the University of California at Irvine and a PhD from the University of Utah working with John Roth and Baldomero Olivera, he joined Mel Simon’s group at Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow in 1986. He was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1989 and moved up the ranks to full professor in 2001. He moved to the University of Utah in 2005 and spent 5 years in the Biology Department there before taking his current position. He was a visiting professor in Winfried Boos’ lab at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in 1997–98, in Guy Cornelis’ lab at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland, in 2004 and in Keiichi Namba’s lab at the University of Osaka in 2005 and 2007. His major research interests have focused on the biogenesis of the bacterial flagellum and coupled gene regulatory mechanisms. Stanley Maloy is Dean of the College of Sciences and a Professor of Biology at San Diego State University. He obtained a PhD from the University of California Irvine and did postdoctoral work at the University of Utah before moving to the University of Illinois. He was also Director of the UIUC Biotechnology Center government. He was the first President of the American Society for Microbiology. Research in the Maloy lab has focused on bacterial genetics, genomics, and pathogenesis, with an emphasis on Salmonella, bacterial viruses, and emerging infectious diseases. He has also been involved in translational research projects focused on new vaccine delivery systems and nanoengineering approaches for the development of narrow spectrum antibiotics.