Kelly Cowan has been a microbiologist at Miami University since 1993. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Louisville, and later worked at the University of Maryland Center of Marine Biotechnology and the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

Her first love is teaching—both doing it and studying how to do it better. She is chair of the Undergraduate Education Committee of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and also Chair of the Education Division of ASM. In 1997, she won a Celebration of Teaching Award from the Greater Cincinnati Consortium of Colleges and Universities. She is currently the Campus Dean at Miami University’s Middletown campus.

Kelly has published (with her students) twenty-four research articles stemming from her work on bacterial adhesion mechanisms and plant-derived antimicrobial compounds. She holds two patents for strategies to block microbial attachment. Kelly also travels extensively to present her research and to talk to other professors about teaching