Dr. Dekker is a Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and recognized expert in the fields of antimicrobial resistance, pathogen evolution, and clinical microbiology. He directs the Bacterial Pathogenesis and Antimicrobial Resistance Section within the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and has been one of the Senior Staff directors of the CLIA-certified Clinical Microbiology Service in the NIH Clinical Center Department of Laboratory Medicine since 2013. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and Ph.D. from Harvard University through the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program and then completed Pathology residency and Medical Microbiology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is board-certified in both Clinical Pathology and Medical Microbiology though the American Board of Pathology and is a fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP). Dr. Dekker’s research focuses on novel mechanisms of resistance in gram-negative bacterial pathogens and their evolution in the larger context of host adaptation. He is an Editor of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and has served as a voting member in the FDA Anti-Infective Drugs Advisory Committee. He received the Beckman-Coulter Young Investigator award from the American Society for Microbiology in 2016, was selected as an NIH Lasker Clinical Research Scholar in 2018, and received the ASCI Young Physician-Scientist Award in 2020.