Barbara Kazmierczak, MD, PhD is the Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation MD-PhD Program Director, Professor of Medicine and Microbial Pathogenesis, and Vice Chair for Basic Research (Medicine) at Yale University. A biochemistry and molecular biology graduate of the University of Chicago, Kazmierczak completed her PhD in Genetics from the Rockefeller University and her MD from Weill Cornell University Medical College. She then finished an internal medicine residency and infectious diseases fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Joanne Engel and Keith Mostov, studying Pseudomonas aeruginosa interactions with epithelia with support from a HHMI Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for Physicians and a NIH K08 career development award. Kazmierczak joined the faculty at Yale University as a physician-scientist, continuing to study host-pathogen interactions with a focus on P. aeruginosa and its innate immune recognition by the host. Kazmierczak became Director of Yale’s MD-PhD Program in 2014, and a founding co-director of Yale’s BioMed Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program (now BioMed Amgen Scholars) in 2015. She has served as MD-PhD Section Chair of the AAMC’s Graduate Education and Training Group and as President of the National Association of MD-PhD Programs. Dr. Kazmierczak’s research has been funded for over 20 years by the NIH, as well as investigator awards from the Donaghue Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. She has served as a Section Editor for PLoS Pathogens and as a member of multiple study sections for NIH/CSR. In recognition of her accomplishments, Kazmierczak has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Interurban Clinical Club, the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and of the American Academy for Microbiology.