Sean Crosson, Ph.D., grew up in Grayson County, Texas, near the Texas-Oklahoma border. He received his B.A. in biology from Earlham College and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from the University of Chicago, where he studied time-resolved X-ray diffraction methods and the structural biology of plant photoreceptors in the lab of Keith Moffat. Crosson was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Lucy Shapiro at Stanford University, where he began studying mechanisms of bacterial signal transduction. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago for 14 years before joining the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University in 2019.