Michael Gilmore, PhD, Sir William Osler Professor of Ophthalmology, gave two lectures in December. On December 5, he presented the Annual Neal Groman Lecture at the University of Washington, where he spoke on the origins of leading multidrug resistant hospital pathogens, the enterococci. The lecture memorialized the work and career of Professor Groman, who was among the first to study the ability of viruses to stably infect bacteria in a process called lysogenization and made many fundamental contributions to the field of microbiology. On December 9, Dr. Gilmore gave the closing plenary lecture at Microbiotec17, in Porto, Portugal, a joint congress of the Portuguese Society of Microbiology and the Portuguese Society of Biotechnology. Microbiotec17 is a forum for collaboration between international researchers and relevant stakeholders in areas as diverse as Industrial and Food Microbiology and Biotechnology; Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology; Health Microbiology and Biotechnology; Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Physiology; Bioprocess Engineering; Cellular Microbiology and Pathogenesis; Genomics and Systems Biology and Emergent technologies.