Kendra Rumbaugh was born in New Mexico and received her B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Texas, El Paso. She attended graduate school at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) in Lubbock, and her doctoral work focused on the role of quorum sensing in the pathogenesis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.  After receiving her Ph.D. in medical microbiology she received a post-doctoral training fellowship from Cystic Fibrosis Research Inc. and moved to San Francisco to work in the Wiener-Kronish laboratory at UCSF.  She eventually returned to Lubbock, where she is now a tenured Professor in the Department of Surgery, with joint appointments in Depts. of Cell Biology and Biochemistry and Immunology and Molecular Microbiology, at TTUHSC. Dr. Rumbaugh's research focuses on understanding and treating wound infections, and she is especially interested in how biofilms, polymicrobial interactions and quorum sensing contribute to bacterial pathogenesis. Dr. Rumbaugh has also been a long-term active mentor of undergraduate, graduate and medical students through CISER/HHMI (for which she is co-director), SABR (TTUHSC's Summer Accelerated Biomedical Research Program, for which she is co-director), The West Texas Association for Women in Science (for which she is a co-founder and previous President) and the American Society for Microbiology (for which she is the current President of the Texas Branch).