Brian Traw earned an B.A. in biology with honors from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago from 2001 to 2005 and a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh from 2005 to 2014, visiting associate professor at Berea College from 2016 to 2018 and currently is an associate professor at Nanjing University. He is the author of 45 peer-reviewed papers, mostly addressing how plants perceive and respond to herbivores and pathogens. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. He is a recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, the Art Neish Young Investigator award from the Phytochemical Society of North America, and the Victor Dropkin Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago. He served on the first advisory panel for the American Plant Genomics Congress.