Manuela Raffatellu is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. She received her M.D. at the University of Sassari, Italy, in 2000, followed by postdoctoral training at Texas A&M University and at the University of California, Davis.  She started her own lab at the University of California, Irvine in 2008, where she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014. She then relocated to the University of California, San Diego in 2017. Her research focuses on many aspects of Salmonella interaction with the mucosal immune response and with the intestinal microbiota in the inflamed gut. Her recent efforts aim to design strategies to reduce intestinal colonization of enteric pathogens without affecting the gut microbiota composition. She is the recipient of several awards, including the IDSA ERF/NFID Astellas Young Investigator Award, the ICAAC Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Microbiology and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award. In 2019, she was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. She serves as editor for Infection and Immunity.