Victoria McGovern, Ph.D. is a senior program officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. She runs the Fund’s programs in Infectious Diseases and in Population and Laboratory Based Sciences, as well as the workforce development-focused Career Guidance for Trainees program. She joined BWF in 1997.

For nearly 25 years she has been involved in science policy efforts related to strengthening the scientific workforce, an interest she continues at BWF. She is past chair of Sigma Xi’s Committee on Public Understanding of Science, was one of the first correspondents for Science’s Next Wave (now Science Careers), and is currently one of the contributors to the Graduate Career Consortium's Carpe Careers blog at Inside Higher Education. She serves on the National Postdoctoral Association’s advisory board, the Committee on Postdoctoral and Graduate Education of the American Society for Microbiology and the Early Career Scientist Steering Committee of the Genetics Society of America.

She earned bachelor’s degrees in Biology and English Literature at Washington University and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, followed by an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship in marine biotechnology at the Cameron Applied Research Center in Charlotte, N.C. At the bench, she was most interested in DNA topology's role in conveying information. She became a member of ASM during grad school.

She has been a presenter in the ASM Grant Writing webinar series.