Dr. Bridget Barker received her B.A. in Biology and M.S. in Ecological Genetics from the University of Montana and completed her Ph.D. in Genetics in 2009 on genomics of Coccidioides spp. at the University of Arizona. She completed her postdoctoral work at Montana State University on sterol regulation in Aspergillus fumigatus in the lab of Dr. Robert Cramer. In 2013, she joined the faculty at TGEN-North, and in 2016 she became tenure track faculty at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute (PMI) in the Department of Biological Sciences. In 2020, she was promoted to Associate Professor, and her career has continued to focus on the evolution and ecology of the human fungal pathogen Coccidioides. Dr. Barker has extensive experience with genomics, bioinformatics, population and molecular genetics, and evolutionary biology. Her background in microbiology, work with fungal pathogens, and computational biology allowed her to develop and bring these new techniques to the field of Valley Fever research. She is committed to service in the mycology community, including program coordinator of the Coccidioidomycosis Study Group, associate editor roles at Fungal Genetics and Biology and Mycologia (since 2018), and is the current President of the Medical Mycology Society of the Americas. She is a recent member of MSA, having focused on medical mycology for most of her career, but is excited to contribute to the broader mycology community if given the opportunity.