Margaret McFall-Ngai, professor and director of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, is the only woman at UH who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In her inaugural article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, commemorating her induction into one of the country’s most distinguished scientific groups, she and a team of researchers reveal a newly discovered mechanism by which organisms select beneficial microbes and reject harmful ones.