Mamta Rawat, Ph.D., is a program director in the Division of Organismal Systems in the Biological Sciences (BIO) Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She also serves as a science adviser in the BIO Directorate. She has been involved in programs that concern microbial physiology and ecology, symbiosis and infection biology, microbiome science and global climate change. Previously, she was a professor at the California State University, Fresno, where her lab studied stress responses of bacteria.