Director of Strategic Partnerships
Kalai Mathee is the joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Microbiology, and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. She is known for her research on bacterial infections caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. She did her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center at Memphis under Martha Howe’s guidance specializing in transcription. Mathee did two post-doctorate fellowships, one at Tufts University focusing on Helicobacter pylori pathogenesis; the other at University of Tennessee Health Science Center working on Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathogenesis. In 2007 she was the founding chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Florida International University. In 2018, she received her master’s degree in Public Health in Health Policy and Management from Florida International University. In 2020, Mathee was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Mathee is the first Florida International University faculty member to receive this honor, and the first Malaysian woman to receive this honor. In 2022 she was awarded the Microbiology Society‘s Microbiology Outreach Prize.