Dr. Nihal Altan-Bonnet received her B.A. in biology and chemistry from Hunter College, New York in 1992 and her Ph.D. in cell biology from The Rockefeller University in 1998. She then conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the National Institute of Child Health and Development at the NIH from 1999 to 2005 before receiving a faculty position in the department of biological sciences at Rutgers University. In 2013, Dr. Altan-Bonnet returned to the NIH as an Earl Stadtman Investigator, becoming head of the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the NHLBI and was promoted to tenured Senior investigator in 2017. Dr. Altan-Bonnet has been recognized several times for her outstanding research, receiving the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) in 2012, being named the John J. Holland lecturer at the American Society of Virology in 2017, and receiving the Norman Salzman Mentor Award in Virology in 2018. Dr. Altan-Bonnet was also named a Kavli Fellow and Scialog Fellow from 2013-2016. She is an Associate editor at the Molecular Biology of the Cell and is a member of the American Societies for Virology, Microbiology, and Cell Biology.