Ed Breitschwerdt is one of the world’s leading experts on bartonellosis, a group of global zoonotic diseases caused by Bartonella bacteria. His work on Bartonella threads back to 1982, when he joined NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) as an internist, specializing in companion animal internal medicine. After clinically encountering a plethora of unusual infectious diseases, he began investigating vector-borne infectious diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a prevalent, potentially fatal disease of dogs and humans in North Carolina. To study this highly virulent bacterial pathogen, he established a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory at CVM, and also started working with David Walker, a leading expert on spotted fever, and Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss medical entomologist who discovered the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease.