Kelly A. Brayton is Professor and Chair of the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology at Washington State University. She holds a BA in Biology from Texas A&M University and a PhD in Biochemistry from Purdue University. She did her postdoctoral work at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute in South Africa where she first got involved with tick-borne pathogens, and initiated the first genome sequence to be completed in Africa. She joined WSU in 1999 where her career has taken genomic approaches to examine the tick-pathogen interface. She has primarily focused on Anaplasma species, but has also worked on eukaryotic tick-borne pathogens of livestock, such as Babesia bovis. She is the Treasurer of the Society for Tropical Veterinary Medicine, Past President for the American Society for Rickettsiology, Fellow of AAAS, and the 2020 Faculty Woman of Distinction for WSU.