Bonnie Bassler has her own fish story but it has nothing to do with the size of her catch.

By closely observing microbes common inside of certain marine animals, the biologist intruded into ongoing “conversations” between bacteria. She found that communication was a chemical process that came to be called “quorum sensing” because bacteria use it to “sense” the presence of fellow bacteria.

Bassler and her associates further discovered that bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate their invasions of higher organisms (plants, animals, and people).
Bassler’s team has found ways to interfere with quorum sensing, and their work is leading to a new generation of antibiotics, a critical medical initiative in the current era of global resistance to available antibiotics.

For her research into quorum sensing and its disruption, Dr. Bassler is the recipient of the 2016 Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Award from the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce.

Born in Chicago and raised in Danville, California, Bassler earned a degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Davis and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from The Johns Hopkins University.

Today, Bassler is Chair and Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and she is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

She is also a stalwart and daily presence at the Princeton New York Sports Club where she teaches aerobics.

Bassler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Society. The latest in a series of prestigious awards, she won is the 2015 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine.