Stavroula Hatzios listens in on dialogues between infectious bacteria and host cells. Trained in chemistry at MIT and Berkeley, she joined West Campus in January 2017 as a faculty member of the Microbial Sciences Institute and the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Hatzios became interested in infectious disease as a graduate student and decided to focus on microbiology as a Harvard postdoc. Today her lab applies chemical tools to study how dangerous microbes, including the one that causes cholera, interact with the host. What she learns could point the way toward new strategies to fight infection.