B. Brett Finlay, PhD, is a professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories and at the University of British Columbia. He has been at the forefront of the emerging field of cellular microbiology and is well recognized internationally for his work, having won prestigious awards including the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and Order of Canada. He is a senior fellow and the program director at Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He co-wrote Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Our Children from an Oversanitized World (Greystone Books, 2016) and lives in Vancouver, BC.