Patricia Claire Zambryski graduated in Genetics at the McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and obtained her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO, USA) in 1974. For her post-doctoral studies, she joined the laboratory of Howard M. Goodman in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of San Francisco (CA, USA). There she analyzed animal tumor virus-specific proteins, and, in collaboration with the University of Ghent, embarked on long-term research to understand tumors caused by Agrobacterium tumefaciens,. From 1981 to 1986, Dr. Zambryski was senior investigator at the Laboratory of Genetics of the Ghent University, where she studied the mechanism of DNA transfer from Agrobacterium to plant cells and  developed vectors for the transfer of DNA of interest to plant cells. In 1986, she became Associate Professor in Molecular Plant Biology at the University of California, Berkeley (CA, USA) and in 1989, Full Professor. In 2001, Professor Zambryski was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of  the American Society of Microbiology. She has authored more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals with high impact factors, 26 review articles, and 35 chapters in books and conference proceedings. Her current interest topic is how plant cells communicate with each other via unique plant-specific intercellular structures, called plasmodesmata, and she continues to study the molecular mechanisms utilized by Agrobacterium to genetically transform plant cells.