Janet Jansson is Chief Scientist for Biology and a Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, USA. Jansson has more than 35 years of experience in microbial ecology. After obtaining her Ph.D. in microbial ecology at Michigan State University (1988) she established a successful career in Sweden for 20 years and was Professor, Chair of Environmental Microbiology, and Vice Dean at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences prior to moving back to the United States in 2007. Jansson was a Senior Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2007-2014 and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark from 2012-2014. She moved to PNNL in 2014 and is currently coordinating several large research projects at PNNL that are focused on the impacts of environmental perturbations, such as climate change, on functions carried out by the soil microbiome. Jansson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the Washington State Academy of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a recent recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has authored more than 250 publications and has been on the list of most highly cited researchers in the world for the past 4 out of 5 years. In addition, she is Past President of the International Society for Microbiology (ISME) and serves on numerous national and international advisory panels, including the National Academies of Sciences, U.S. National Committee for Soil Science