Zemer Gitai is the Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where he has been a faculty member since 2005. He received his B.Sc. from MIT, his Ph.D. from UCSF, and trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Lucy Shapiro at Stanford, where he pioneered the study of the bacterial actin cytoskeleton.

His research group studies the cell biology of bacterial pathogens, asking how bacteria are physically organized, how they sense and respond to their mechanical and microbial environments, and how these properties determine the outcome of infection. This work helped establish the field of mechano-microbiology and has led to the development of novel platform technologies, including M3-Seq and Duet-Seq for single-cell bacterial transcriptomics, and the discovery of antibiotics with mechanisms that evade resistance. He is co-founder of ArrePath and ePhective Therapeutics.

Dr. Gitai's work has been recognized by two NIH Director's Pioneer Awards, the NIH Director's Transformative Research Award, the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the Waksman Award for Microbiology, and the Award for Distinguished Innovation from Princeton University. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.