Craig Montell received his B.A. in Bacteriology from UC Berkeley, his Ph.D. in Microbiology from UCLA, and performed his postdoctoral work with Gerry Rubin at UC Berkeley. After 25 years on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he moved to UC Santa Barbara in 2013 where he is a Distinguished Professor, and holds the Duggan Chair. Dr. Montell is an elected fellow of the AAAS and holds honorary doctorate degrees from KU Leuven and the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Montell’s research focuses on uncovering the molecular mechanisms through which animals detect and transduce sensory information in peripheral sensory cells. He began his long-term interest in sensory biology in the 1980s, at a time when he identified the founding TRP through his early work on Drosophila visual transduction. He then showed that TRPs comprise a family of proteins conserved from worms to humans. Focusing on Drosophila, he identified roles for TRP channels in proprioception, thermosensation and taste. He also discovered the activation for TRPM5, which functions in mammalian taste. Most recently, Dr. Montell has turned his attention to characterizing the sensory mechanisms that the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, uses to home in on people, and spread the viruses that cause dengue and other diseases afflicted hundreds of millions of people each year. Among his most recent discoveries, he found mosquitoes that detect the thermal infrared radiating from the human body, and do so through the Aedes TRPA1 channel.