Postdoctoral fellow Pascale Guiton seeks to understand the biology of Toxoplasma gondii. The common parasite causes toxoplasmosis – a disease particularly harmful in the immunosuppressed – that affects millions globally. On the origin of her interest in microbiology, the researcher explains: "Growing up in Africa, you come in contact with disease. A lot of people get sick and we don't really understand why. There's this idea that everything is voodoo or witchcraft, and I knew it couldn't just be that. I just wanted to understand it."

To better understand how small-scale interactions at the molecular level affect life at the cellular level, graduate student Fabian Ortega researches Listeria monocytogenes invasion mechanisms in lab-grown cells and organoids. Though unraveling the secrets of bacterial infection has obvious benefits for humanity, the percentage of the U.S. federal budget devoted to research and development has dropped from nearly 10 percent in 1968 to about 3 percent in 2015.

Viviana Risca, a postdoctoral fellow in Professor William Greenleaf's lab, works to provide new insights into the DNA damage and repair processes underlying many diseases and developmental abnormalities. When just 17 years old, the researcher won what some have dubbed the "Junior Nobel Prize" – the nationwide Intel Science Talent Search – accompanied by a $100,000 scholarship. In the award-winning high school project, Risca was able to encode a secret message in a strand of DNA, and she is still investigating DNA to this day.

Denise Monack, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology, researches how bacteria cause disease. "In the future, there will be even less of a chance of having new approaches to the treatment of infectious disease if you have less people in the discovery and exploration phase," she says. Monack's observation that Salmonella kills macrophages – a type of immune cell generated in response to infection – formed the foundation for research on inflammasomes, activators of the body's inflammatory response.

Justin Sonnenburg, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology, studies interactions between gut bacteria and host. On funding for basic science, he reflects: “We spend the bulk of our time writing grants to fund our research program, and when young scientists are training, they see this incredible burden of having to work really hard just to get a little bit of science going in your lab. So I think funding is really the primary concern with young scientists trying to decide whether they're going to stay in basic sciences or leave and go into another field.”

Michael Levitt is the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor in Cancer Research at the Stanford School of Medicine, and professor and chair of computational structural biology. In 2013 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing multi-scale computer models for complex chemical systems. Chemical reactions happen so fast that it can be difficult to study them in real time. In the 1970s, Levitt and colleagues set out to address this problem by creating computer-simulated reactions that could be slowed down and studied in depth.

W.E. Moerner is the Harry S. Mosher Professor of Chemistry and, by courtesy, professor of applied physics. In 2014, he won the Nobel Prize for his role in developing a microscopy technique that allows scientists to visualize living cells at the molecular level. Prior to Moerner's work, no one had ever actually seen a single molecule. Rendering the tiny particles visible at the smallest scale opened new possibilities for drug development and disease management.