Michael Lenardo was born in Chicago, Illinois, obtained a B.A.in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) from Washington University - St. Louis in 1981. He received clinical and research training at the University of Iowa hospitals and clinics and was then a Research Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During this time, he carried out molecular biology research under the mentorship of Nobel laureates David Baltimore and Philip Sharp. He was then appointed Section Chief in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health from 1989 to the present, directing research on T-lymphocyte regulation, HIV-1, and genetic diseases of the immune system. He has served on the editorial boards for the European Journal of Immunology, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Science magazine, and Biology Direct. He is an Adjunct Professor of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has founded or co-founded several joint research programs including the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Biomedical Research Scholars, the NIH-University of Pennsylvania Immunology Program, the NIH-Marshall Scholars, the NIH-Rhodes Scholars, and the National M.D./Ph.D. partnership program. Dr. Lenardo has published over 280 scholarly works and holds a number of medical patents. He discovered the propriocidal mechanism of immune regulation and his work has defined several genetic diseases of the immune system including the Autoimmune Lymphoproliferative Syndrome, Caspase-8 deficiency syndrome, and X-linked magnesium deficiency with EBV and neoplasia (XMEN) disease, and CD55 deficiency with hyperactivation of complement, angiopathic thrombosis, and protein-losing enteropathy (CHAPLE) disease. He is currently the Director of the Clinical Genomics Program and Chief of the Molecular Development of the Immune System Section, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health. Among his honors and awards, he is Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.), conferred by Queen Elizabeth II, March, 2006 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Medicine, and a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Great Britain. In 2020, he was awarded the American Association of Immunologists Steinman award for contributions to human immunology. He is married to Lesley-Anne Furlong, M.D. and has two sons, Brian and Timothy.