Dr. McFall-Ngai studies animal-microbial symbioses as a faculty at Caltech and a staff scientist at Carnegie Science, She holds Honoris Causa (honorary PhD) positions: at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland; University Claude Bernard, Lyon, France; and University of Kiel, Germany. She was a Guggenheim Fellow (2010), an AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (2010-2016), and a fellow at the Wissenschaft Kolleg in Berlin (2024). She is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology (2002), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), the National Academy of Sciences (2014) and is an HHMI Professor (2018- ).