Michael Ibba is the Dean of Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University. Prior to joining Chapman, he was the Chair of the Microbiology Department and served as the Associate Director for the Infectious Disease Institute and Co-director of an NIH-funded graduate training program at The Ohio State University, where he taught for 19 years. He obtained an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Imperial College in London and then went on to complete PhD work in the field of microbial biochemistry at the University of Manchester.  After graduating he undertook both industrial and academic post-docs in Switzerland and the US before going on to set up his own independent research group. He has published over 200 research articles and has received several awards and distinctions. Notably, in 2019 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award at The Ohio State University and in 2017 and 2020 received the Faculty Award for Diversity Enhancement in the College of Arts and Sciences. He currently serves as chair of the National Science Foundation Federal Advisory Committee for Biological Sciences (BIO-AC) and is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Dr. Ibba's research is directed towards understanding the mechanisms that determine how cells ensure the accurate translation of the genetic code, and how changes in the underlying processes in response to stress impact cellular health and viability. He is also a member of the leadership team of the National Science Foundation-funded EMergent Ecosystem Responses to ChanGE (EMERGE) Biology Integration Institute which integrates research, training, and high-resolution field and laboratory measurements across 15 scientific subdisciplines and 14 institutions, in order to understand ecosystem-climate feedbacks in a thawing permafrost peatland in arctic Sweden.