Anthony Garza received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1995 and was a Ford Foundation and NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis and Stanford University. His first faculty position was in the School of Molecular Biosciences at Washington State University, where he used systems-level approaches to study the gene regulatory networks associated with bacterial biofilm formation. Since 2004, Dr. Garza has been a member of the Department of Biology faculty at Syracuse University, where he has continued his research on bacterial gene regulatory networks and started new projects on bacterial natural products (secondary metabolites). Dr. Garza has been a program director in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (MCB) at the National Science Foundation since 2013. He is currently a program director in the Systems and Synthetic Biology cluster of MCB.