Professor Brun received his Masters in Chemistry from l’Université de Moncton in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from l’Université Laval in 1990. He received fellowships from the National Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) for both his Masters and Ph.D. studies. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Stanford University with fellowships from NSERC and from the Medical Research Council of Canada from 1990 to 1993. Professor Brun then accepted a faculty position at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he is currently Professor of Biology and Director of the Microbiology and Molecular Biology Program, and where he has received many teaching awards. More than 30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and more than 40 undergraduate researchers have been trained in his laboratory. From 1998 to 2005, he was Director of a NSF funded Research Experience for Undergraduate Program in Molecular Biology and Genetics.

Professor Brun was Editor of the Journal of Bacteriology (2003-07), one of the two leading scientific journals in the field of microbiology, and was a regular member of the NIH grant review panel on Microbial Physiology and Genetics (1998-2002). In 2005, he received the Academic Scientific Achievement Award of the Indiana Branch American Society for Microbiology. Professor Brun has been involved in the organization of many international scientific meetings, including being the founding organizer of the American Society for Microbiology Conference on Prokaryotic Development and of the International Conference on Caulobacter. He is currently the Director of the Microbial Systems Node of the Indiana MetaCyt research initiative whose goal is to understand the basic mechanisms of bacterial cell function.

Professor Brun studies the basic molecular mechanisms that control complex cellular processes in bacteria, including cell differentiation, cell division, and adhesion to surfaces using the model bacterium Caulobacter crescentus. He has received continuous funding for his research from the NIH since 1993 in addition to funding from the DOE and the NSF, including a NSF CAREER Award (1998-2003). He has published more than 50 articles in leading scientific journals and has been invited to give more than 100 talks on his research at international scientific meetings and leading universities around the world. Professor Brun and colleagues’ discovery of nature’s strongest adhesive produced by the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus was selected as one of the Top 2006 Stories in Science by the online science magazine The Future of Things.