G. Balakrish Nair is an Indian microbiologist. At present, he is the Ag. Regional Adviser, Research Policy and Cooperation Unit, Department of Communicable Diseases, World Health Organization. Before joining WHO, he was the executive director of Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Faridabad, NCR, India. Before joining THSTI, he was working in NICED as the director. He has also served as the director of Laboratory Sciences Division at the International Center for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, (ICDDR, B), Dhaka, Bangladesh. Education and career He received BSc degree from Madras University in 1975 & MSc degree in Marine Biology in 1977 from Annamalai University, and acquired PhD from Annamalai University in 1982. He joined the Department of Microbiology, National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), Calcutta, a constituent Institute of the Indian Council of Medical Research and a WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Diarrhoeal Diseases, in 1981 and worked there till 5 April 2000, after which he took up his current assignment. He has been working on enteric pathogens with particular emphasis on Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of the disease cholera. Research paths In 1987–88, he did postdoctoral research on the heat-stable enterotoxin of V. cholerae with Dr. Tae Takeda in the Department of Infectious Diseases Research, National Children's Medical Research Center, Tokyo, Japan and in 1994–95 he did his sabbatical research on molecular epidemiology of V. cholerae at the Department of Microbiology, Kyoto University, with Professor Yoshifumi Takeda. He was a visiting scientist at the Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1992 for three months, where he worked with Dr. David Sack and at the Laboratory Centre for Disease Control, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1985 where he worked with Dr. Hermy Lior. Committee work Dr. Nair is an elected member of the Subcommittee on the Taxonomy of Vibrionaceae, International Committee on Systematic Bacteriology from 1986. In August 1996 at the Jerusalem IUMS Congress, he was elected as the Secretary of this subcommittee. He was elected to the position of Member-at-Large of the International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS) at the Executive Board Meeting held on 7 July 1994 at Prague, Czech Republic and held this position until August 1999; he is the first Indian Microbiologist to be on the executive board of the IUMS. He was elected as the Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India (FNASc) in 1995, as