Background
Greenberg was born in 1948 in New New York
Greenberg was born in 1948 in New New York
His family moved to Seattle, where he finished high school. He obtained his Mississippi in Microbiology from the University of Iowa and his Doctor of Philosophy in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
He has been Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology, University of Washington in Seattle since 2005. In 2015, he was a co-recipient of the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine for his distinguished work in quorum sensing. He entered Western Washington University in Bellingham in 1966 and obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology in 1970.
After a postdoctoral position at Harvard University, he joined Cornell University as an assistant professor
Greenberg joined the University of Iowa as a professor in 1988 and the University of Washington in 2005. Before Greenberg"s research, bacterial communication was not generally accepted by microbiologists.
Each bacterium was considered to be an individual cell that behaved independently from other bacteria. However, his research describes the mechanism by which bacteria communicate with each other.
While he was a professor at Iowa, in 1994, he and his colleagues coined the term quorum sensing, a process of cell-to-cell bacterial communication.
As of June 2015, he is a professor at the University of Washington and his lab studies fields such as quorum sensing and biofilms.
National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.