Bonnie Bassler

Bonnie Lynn Bassler is an American molecular biologist born in 1962 in Chicago, Illinois, who chairs the department of molecular biology at Princeton University as the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology. Her research established that bacteria communicate through a chemical signaling process called quorum sensing, in which cells release and detect small molecules to coordinate group behavior, showing that many bacterial species are multilingual and use several such signaling molecules at once, work that has opened new strategies for disrupting bacterial communication to treat infection. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine in 2015, the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2020, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2022, the Princess of Asturias Award in 2023, and the National Medal of Science in 2025.