Cynthia Gleason is an associate professor at Washington State University (WSU) in the Department of Plant Pathology working in nematology. She obtained her PhD from UC Davis with Dr. Valerie Williamson. She then worked as a post-doctoral fellow in plant biology at the John Innes Center (Norwich, UK) and CSIRO (Perth, Australia). In 2011, she moved to Germany to become a Jr. Professor at Georg August University working on plant parasitic nematodes. She moved to WSU in 2016 to continue her research program on root-knot nematodes. Her research group focuses on the molecular mechanisms underpinning root-knot nematode - plant interactions.